Automatically notify producers

Software improvement 5-Done
1

What is the need / problem

When a hub’s order cycle is finished the producer is not notified that she needs to provide those products to that hub unless a hub manager clicks on the “NOTIFY ALL PRODUCERS” button on the order cycle page.

It’s very likely that either the hub manager doesn’t notice that button and if so, she forgets about it. The whole point of the order cycle having an end date is that it gets closed automatically and as such, it should also notify the producer.

Who does it impact

Mainly producers but also hub managers need to remember when an order cycle finishes and then push the “NOTIFY ALL PRODUCERS” button.

What is the current impact of this problem

This affects all hubs and producers. Moreover, the more hubs a producer sells to, the harder for her to keep track of all the order cycles.

What is the benefit in focusing on this

This will remove the manual intervention on order cycles avoiding both the producer to check when the order cycles finish and the hub manager to remember notifying the producer.

Links to more details

A hub manager in katuma sent us an email with the following content:

(…) The third thing is that l’Aresta doesn’t see our orders and I don’t know this is due to:

  1. I do something wrong
  2. They don’t do it well (the producer)
  3. I didn’t understand how it works
  4. Katuma does not work well

The fact is that I thought that they would see what we ordered to them, when the order cycle ends, and wouldn’t have to send the orders by email.

Potential solutions that will solve this problem

The solution involves scheduling a job to be executed at the time the order cycle closes. When executed, it will send the producer notification email.

To do this we need to add an entry in the config/schedule.rb as done in openfoodnetwork/config/schedule.rb at master · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub. The background job executed should go through the finished order cycles and enqueuing a openfoodnetwork/app/jobs/order_cycle_notification_job.rb at master · openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork · GitHub job for each of them.

2

There are cases where a hub manager will not want the order sent automatically (ex. bulk orders need adjusting or if too litle is ordered from a supplier to meet certain requirements, orders can be adjusted to reflect new numbers… prior to sending notification)
it could be interesting to have an option to run the notification by default, with a check box option to hold off and run manually

1 Like
3

Good to know @CynthiaReynolds. This definitely makes it a little bit more complex :sweat: but it may be necessary.

1 Like
4

For us (Ridorta), as group of consumers, we find both cases with diferent producers. It will be necessary that this option (to send order automatically or not) affect to every relation between hub and producer.

5

Sorry to be picky @sauloperez but what you describe here is a possible feature candidature to work on a broader focus point that would be “Hubs can easily manage their orders to suppliers in the most fluid and adapted way” or something like that.
Sending an automatic email to producer could be feature candidate (you are already in a solution here but an icebox item is not a solution yet!) but there could be others and we need to brainstorm them. So moving back that to wishlist, before we capture a clearer icebox for it. I captured the need in the global roadmap spreadsheet and linked it to this wishlist item anyway so we don’t loose track of the need :wink:

6

Sure! I’m just not used to the new process yet.

7

This is now a settings in the OC :slight_smile: Closing !