Request quotation from purchase requisitions without purchase demand

Intro

The purchase_requisition module provides a central interface for employees to initiate and monitor a procurement process based on unqualified and minimal information. Once a purchase requisition is qualified and confirmed by experts, purchase requests are generated.
The purchase_request_quotation module enables the request and management of supplier quotations based on purchase requests.

Problem

In some cases it is necessary to request quotations from suppliers without a direct purchase requirement, e.g. when calculating sales prices for one-off/individual productions. The calculation is essentially based on a rough preliminary design, which results in a bill of materials with priced components that can then be offered for sale. To determine the price for the components it would be good to be able to obtain quotations directly from the purchase requisitions.
Since the sale is still in the quotation phase, it is essential to avoid ordering or purchasing components at this stage.
Unfortunately, the interaction of the purchase_requisition and purchase_request_quotation modules is not useful because a purchase request is mandatory to create a supplier request for quotations. But a purchase request would be misleading, because it is not yet clear whether the underlying sale will be ordered by the customer.

What do you think, is it an idea, to allow also purchase requisition lines to generate purchase request quotations?

I’m not sure your description should use purchase request quotation. Indeed for me it is no a quotation at all by a request for supplier price (to fill the product supplier form).
So I think it should be a new document for which the result will be to fill the product supplier.

I’ve seen the situation Udo describes in the past, and in some cases you’re just asking for a price list price to the supplier in which case your proposal works perfectly.

But in other cases, you’re asking the supplier for a price on a per project/order basis. Maybe because it must be adjusted to the quantity or even that specific customer. In those cases, we’ve implemented a link between purchase lines and sale lines, but something in the line of what Udo suggests would be better I think.

We have such case for our trading department. Customers are asking price for many products or price for quantity.

We customized Sale Opportunity to input customer request. Then we’ve created a module called Price Request. Price Request are lines of product price request (generated manually or through a wizard from sale opportunity lines).

Then we’ve created a module “Supplier Quotations” (similar as module purchase_request_quotation) that allows purchaser to create quotations from price requests and send them to suppliers. When an answer is received, purchaser input price (and other details). So the user can now see quotations lines in his price request and select the best one to offer a price to the customer.

It is not only asking for a supplier price. It is also asking for transportation costs, taxes and customs duties, I guess it is what we name cost price in Tryton.
Also it is asking roughly for delivery dates or delivery offsets after order and possible replacement products.
And sometimes there is no product at all what is requested, it can be a service done to a product (coating, polishing,…) or an external production (more bellow).

But for now we already have two ways to request for quotations (RFQ) from supplier, one provided by the purchase module and one provided by purchase_request_quotation. I wonder if it will be good to have a third module providing a similar functionality in parallel, instead of integrating them all and having only one RFQ report to maintain…

yes, it is a way. Because purchase lines are not requiring purchase requests. It can become very dangerous to unintentionally order products from a supplier, which aren’t already ordered by the customer. I guess, it can be controlled by the sale state on the purchase line.
And it only works for known parts which are named in a sale line. The problem here is, that a production is requested by the customer and the company creates a draft BOM for this. All the details are hidden inside the newly produced product.

In your example we would have a sale line with one product to be produced and 700 purchase lines connected to it. Here we would lose the overall view and the connection of products to BOMs or sub BOMs.

This sounds interesting, but I have some questions regarding the similarity and difference between price requests and purchase requests:

  • Is the functionality of Supplier Quotations based on price requests only or does it also require a purchase request to create a supplier request for quotation (RFQ) as purchase_request_quotation module does?
  • Why are price requests separated from purchase requests?
  • Why are price requests not a special kind of informal purchase requests, which can’t be purchased, but RFQed from suppliers.

In your case it sounds reasonable to create price requests based on sale opportunity lines.
In our case the company has only the rough requirement/specification of the customer for a final product which doesn’t exists. To answer the customers RFQ it is needed for the company to draft plan how to design and produce it. Sale opportunity lines are close to the customer and selling one product, but the planning is internal and close to the production and BOM (demanding 700 parts).

In my experience for the company a good “entry point” for possible-purchase-requests-based-on-fussy-assumptions is the purchase_requisition module. It allows the designer to roughly describe what she needs and the procurement experts to translate this into a (possible) purchase demand which can be RFQed from suppliers.
The things which are RFQed from the suppliers can be products, spare parts, services like coating/cleaning/polishing, but also individual external productions and processings, like e.g. a plate 9mmx200x400mm, made of a special metal, with drilling based on a given construction plan attached at the supplier RFQ.

It’s based on price requests only.

In our case, customer are asking us for “something” and price (and sometimes prices for quantity too).
We don’t know if customer will buy “something” that he request. (maybe he asked the same request to multiple company and he is waiting for the best quotation) so we prefer to have a model outside the purchase request module. Sellers generate price requests from sale opportunity lines or they input each price request manually with detailed information asked by customer. Purchase request module is (most of the time) something that must be purchased (empty stock, requisition validated, …)

It could be… but maybe our process is complicated:

  • customer is asking something
  • seller create a price request or a sale opportunity that generates a price request
  • purchaser ask suppliers a quotation and fill details when receive response (price, alternate product, incoterm, delay, …)
  • seller choose best quotation from answered quotations on his price request
  • seller reply price calculated (margin, costs, …) based on the price from the selected quotation and details to customer
  • if customer agree: we create a sale manually or from sale_opportunity if exists (we are taking only lines with a price) and we also generate a purchase_requisition from the price_request with the best quotation selected by the seller. Supervisor could evaluate requisition and updating quantities and then a purchase request is created…

Maybe such process could be integrated with existing modules… but it’s also a question of management and access rights. We don’t want sellers had access to purchase request module, it’s only for the purchasers. Price request is a module for both sellers and purchasers. And with this module they could also check for history of price request for a product.