Hi,
Has anyone considered using or maybe implemented already Tryton for 3rd party logistics service provider?
I need it and I can contribute to the related development, if necessary.
Andrew
What is missing to Tryton?
Many features demanded by 3PLs are present in Tryton already, like a movable storage or preferred location.
Some others perhaps exist as well, but I’m not aware of them yet or the required goal may be achieved indirectly. I must admit I don’t know Tryton good enough yet.
Ideally would be to support chaotic warehouse, which means very detailed location of every item. [Inventory Location] is a very good because it helps to find preferred locations, but goods received not always land in their preferred locations, which creates chaos. It’s necessary to keep track of every item (every unit) location and then quickly find them.
Each 3PL customer must access their own and only their own stock and shipping information - maybe this could be achieved by by appropriate configuration of roles and permissions.
Another 3PL specific feature is billing. Billing schemes can be different and sometimes complicated, but this coud be easily done by a quite separate module, based on data from Stock module, I suppose.
Each 3PL client (merchant) have their own sales channels. We need separate set of sales channel connections for each merchant.
3PLs run a kind of virtual warehouse for each of their customer (merchant) as one of the solutions. Each with their own stocks and sales channels. That’s why I considered a separate Tryton instance for each merchant and aggregating some data from all of them.
I think I found out how to implement most of the requirements, but I can’t figure out if it would be possible to have a “goods owner” - a party to which a product (item) in stock belongs. In a 3PL warehouse there are goods (products) belonging to the serviced companies, not to the company running the warehouse. Each of the serviced companies wants to see and manage their own stock and only their own stock. Any suggestions or ideas if ths could be achieved in the current Tryton? I considered running a completely separate instance of Tryton for each serviced company, but this approach would not work.
I think you should use the multi-company features. So on the system you create for each customer a new company. So you can use the same locations but as each order and stock move is linked to a company, they can not interfere.
The drawback is that you need to switch the user from one company to another. This could be improved by Issue 4080: Remove company record rules - Tryton issue tracker
You will probably also need to have a consolidate view of the warehouse and the stock level including all the companies.
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A consolidated view of the warehouse and the stock level seems to have a low priority at least at the beginning. It looks very promising then 
Thanks!
I understand the issue4080 still needs some work, right?
It requires a large change so it has not been done.
Yes, I saw the complexity in the issues.
For 3PL only the stock module is necessary. A 3PL service provider only handles stock and orders shipping, returns, pushing stock levels to sales channels (online shops mostly). Everything else, like Invoicing, accounting etc is done by the 3PL clients themselves.
Another thing is some 3PL clients could use Tryton for themselves as well perhaps. This might be a recommended solution perhaps.