Advance Orders/Future Procurement

Product Development
1

This is here for discussion and as a place to exchange ideas.

History - OFN-Canada has a funded project to build specialty cut flower hubs on the OFN platform. There are 7 hubs now. Our funding includes development of 5 features that address cut flower farm/hub needs. This document describes the priorities (as per discussions with the hubs last year.)

One of the top priorities is the ability for buyers to place ‘advance orders’ or ‘pre-orders’ or also called ‘pre-books’.

Use Case: A wholesale flower buyer (usually an event planner or floral design firm) has a wedding booked for 3 months in the future. (often longer) The buyer has a wishlist of local cut flowers and wants to procure as much as possible from small scale, sustainable farmers. The buyer wants to be able to visit a hub store (supplied by multiple suppliers to maximize the possibility of finding the products she wants) and reserve the product she needs. Later, this reservation becomes an order and payment/delivery… is made.

Initial thoughts/Issues doing this using the OFN app:

Technically, all OFN orders are ‘preorders’. So a hub could set any number of order cycles into the future, suppliers could stock the stores, payment method could be set to ‘pay once order is confirmed’ so payment is not made until product is available. Suppliers would run reports weekly to see whats been ordered for upcoming weeks…

So - we are almost there! A few things need to be developed/modified for this to work:

  1. Date picker - a list of 20 or more order cycles in the drop down is not useable. So maybe there could be a date picker interface, that links to pre-set order cycles. When the buyer selects the date, the store for that date opens. The store is stocked with the suppliers ‘best guess’ at what products they expect to be available.

  2. Setting stock by date: Right now all order cycles count down from a shared pool of stock. So imagine a supplier sells daffodils and will take prebooks for weeks 14, 15, 16 and 18. They have 100 bunches - but the bunhes aren’t all available at once. Living things grow gradually, so its not like an existing set inventory. If a buyer reserves 100 bunches in week 18, that leaves no daffodils for week 14. But really, there are, for example, 50 bunches in week 14, 25 in week 15… There is no way in OFN at present for a supplier to link on hand amounts to specific order cycles.
    As an aside - I’ve experimented with using a spreadsheet (which could be an OFN integration) to forecast stock by order cycle, and then every few days, remove items from the incoming section of order cycles if they have been ordered in a different order cycle. Its VERY tedious and time consuming. I can’t imagine many producers doing it, unless someone can imagine an amazing integration.

  3. Notifications need to change: We don’t really want the buyer to receive an order ‘confirmation’ at the reservation stage. No supplier can ‘confirm’ a product 3 or more months out. We want the buyer to get a ‘reservation notice’ perhaps - something that tells them the producer knows about this and is reserving the product for them, and that the buyer will get an order confirmation when we are 2 weeks out from the event/delivery date. (Possibly we could find a way to translate the current order confirmation…?)

  4. Communications between hub and supplier: 2 weeks (or something) ahead of the delivery date, suppliers need to confirm availability of the reserved materials, and confirm pricing and order quantity. Who do they confirm this to? Ideally this is done through the hub (since the hub is legally the seller). So somehow we need suppliers to confirm to the hub, and then the hub prepares a back office order for the buyer. But right now there are no in-app supplier-hub coms. So maybe this is something created outside of OFN - like a set of google sheets where suppliers confirm the availability of preordered stock and a system of integrated email reminders.

Its preliminary thinking I realize. Maybe others see better ways to do this. maybe the entire process happens outside of OFN, maybe in a separate app designed for this, and then orders can be put into OFN? That would have the advantage of building a UI specifically for product reservation.

Finally - while the use case above is wholesale flower buyers with scheduled events, I think other procurement scenerios could be very similar. A restaurant might want to set holiday features well in advance and reserve local product (especially if its local, organic product that is always in short supply like berries …). A food box supplier might want to line up the contents of the box for each week of the season. A caterer also works to specific event dates in the future and will want to procure product for future dates …

Apologies for the non-tech nature of this - I’ve written this from a user perspective. Love to hear thoughts on moving forward.

2

This is great @tschumilas. My initial thought is API (DFC) + custom interface will be much better than trying to massage ofn UI

3

before jumping to any infrastructure decision we’ve met with @tschumilas today and talk a bit more about the underlying uses cases. Here are my notes, Theresa feel free to add anything I might have forgotten.

One story I found interesting:

Currently in Canada there is a slack channel where “lazy” buyers are displaying what they want to buy and the producer who manage to work with them are the first ones to answer. This means the buyer has a big impact on the process and some producers already said they want to stop working like that.

As OFN, one key value we would want to pay attention here is to keep to the power balance in the hand of the producer, otherwise we might be repeating what the market is already doing.

Setting stock by date

This is one way to solve the need, but it is still not the best solution for producer for whom setting future stock might be difficult (esp. when the product is rare ie it needs an on hand value).

One idea that is linked to point 3. would be to have a new order state (pre-order) and a new type of OC (reservation?). All orders on these OC would be pre-order and would need producers confirmation to reach the “confirmed” orders stage.

What is interesting about this workflow is that it keeps the producer in charge.
however if the producer is confirming a product or proposing a different quantity, they would be in a direct relationship with the buyer

Maybe in some cases they would prefer the hub to handle this for them. Maybe they would be ready to pay a fee for it?
Theresa will check with hubs and producers and we will meet again on the 7th of October. In the meantime I will bring another feature for estimation at delivery circle (which has a higher priority level than this one).

Some additional info:

Date picker- a list of 20 or more order cycles in the drop down is not useable

Here we are talking about the shopfront dropdown for the OC “ready for” message.

4

Yes I was talking about the ‘ready for’ list when I said 20 or more OCs is not useable. I just had my own hub open 9 simultaneous order cycles - and eventhough I thought I had them very clearly named/labelled - lots of customers ordered in the wrong shops. I’d be interested to learn if anyone has more than 5 or 6 order cycles open simultaneously, and how it works for customers.

5

I’m back to this advance orders issue after several long convos with flower farmers and hubs.

One of the concepts the farmers/hubs like a lot is the idea that when advance orders/preorders are placed, they are not based on specific on-hand (stock) allocations in OFN. Rather, a buyer places a kind of ‘wishlist’ order - conceptual order - based on a listing of potential products. This potential products list is not exactly the supplier’s OFN product list. Rather it is a sublist of the supplier’s products - those that are likely available for a particular season (or maybe specific date) in the future. No on hand amount is set - all these potential products are ‘on demand’.

Suppliers like this because they can forecast for this. They know what is growing and likely to be harvestable in a future window - but they don’t know for sure, and they don’t know the amounts.

So - if this is the path we are thinking along - then I’m curious about how this plays out when an order is placed.

So supplier A & B have listed daffodils in their ‘likely available’ listing - on demand. The buyer places an order for 6 bunches from Supplier A (whose products they like). When the date for the order comes closer, somehow we need to check in with Supplier A to see if they indeed will have 6 bunches of daffodils.

Growers here imagined that Supplier A (the buyer’s preferred supplier) gets a notification asking them if they can confirm the availability of 6 bunches of daffodils for next week (or whatever).

If Supplier A says yes, then these daffodils are confirmed on the buyer’s order (or maybe now the wishlist turns into an order or something…) And if Supplier A says - I can only confirm 3 of 6 - then 3 bunches go to the confirmed order.

But we got stuck if Supplier A says no. What happens? Does the buyer get a notification that their advance order isn’t confirmed. Or do other suppliers who had that item get asked if they can supply?

Sorry if this is all out of place here - but its the kind of concrete things that growers are asking me about…so just wondering what we are imagining.