This is a place to start to share thoughts about a new procurement direction for OFN.
IF it should be somewhere else - lets move it.
Extending from the last Global Governance meeting, in October we are going to have a meeting to start to share thoughts/information related to a potential new ‘procurement’ direction for OFN.
I was thinking today about the question: - What kinds of functionality does a wholesale buyer need (compared to a consumer buying in an OFN shop) and how different is this from what we have?
I am a wholesale buyer for seedlings (we call them plugs) for flower farmers across Canada. They order in an OFN shop, and then I enter the orders in a procurement platform. So as I thought about it today, there are a few features that are critical for me as a wholesale buyer. I’ve done a little zoom recording to show you the platform I use and to highlight the functionality we may want to ask wholesale food buyers about. I believe there are 3 ‘big’ things:
As a wholesale buyer I need to place orders in the future to ‘reserve’ product.
As a producer, who wants to sell wholesale, I need to be able to forecast and manage stock in the future.
As a wholesale buyer I need to track orders, order changes, invoices and payments on invoices in a more sophisticated way that the current OFN ‘account’ allows.
I’ve made a short zoom recording to show the procurement platform I use. I just thought it might be helpful to start us thinking this way because in some ways, procurement is quite different that the current OFN shopping/selling experience.
Here is some background on the procurement work we have done in the UK
A 9 month procurement pilot project in 2 Welsh counties - this blog includes a video about that project
This new project led by Coventry University which will be a research programme following the extension of the Welsh pilot into 4 UK food hubs over 4 years
There is an experiment here (St Lo) for catering (schools…) to procure local products. One of the main problems (apart from planing that you mentioned) we had is that they often need more product than one producer can provide. So they should be able (easily!) to buy carrots for instance from 2 or 3 producers.
And this would mean - I think - that the buyer needs to be able to specify some criteria, so that the product from multiple producers is more or less the same. Like: same/similar size, quality, availability date, ??
Is this order payed for at the time of stock reservation?
I wonder about the real world logistics. Can the supplier organise more stock if they know in advance? Or is there limited stock and we need stock per order cycle?
There’s a lot to unpack here. Do we just need a log for each order to track changes?
We do have tracked invoices mostly implemented already, but it ran out of money.
There might be a good way forward with the current DFC work. In the current pilot, a product sold in OFN can be linked to a product on another platform (Shopify). Backorders are automatically placed on the other platform to fulfill stock. We could extend this logic to link one retail product to multiple supplier products. Backorders can then be placed at multiple suppliers according to their stock levels. That’s maybe a week of work.
@maikel - you ask great questions!!!
Re: payment for reserved products. I’d say that payment happens once an order or invoice is made. And generally, if product is ‘reserved’ months ahead, no payment is made. (At least thats the case in the flower world)
Re: can the supplier organize more stock if they know in advance? Yes - but in my experience, I need to know a full year in advance (which doesn’t usually happen) because my inputs (bulbs, seedlings, seeds…) are ordered a year ahead of the crop harvest. BUT it could be that connecting buyers and sellers around preorders results in delighted buyers, and they make ‘off line’ arrangements directly with growers to custom grow for them in the future.
But in the short term - yes, I think we need stock per order cycle - either in the app, or in some kind of integration.
Re: tracking changes - it could be that moving to procurment leads us to get back to the work on tracking order changes. When I’m taking wholesale orders now - orders that are LIKELY to change because there is a long time between ordering and delivery - every month I download all the invoices - so I have a record. Then when I make a change to an order, I leave a note on the order and I re-send the confirmation. So one thing would be if the notes we leave on orders are included in the confirmation maybe. Then customers know why I’ve re-sent it. Customers log into their account to check their order, but they tell me they don’t see my note about changes there. So maybe thats a simpler way to address tracking changes.
I think this idea of filling an order by pooling product across multiple smaller scaled suppliers is FANTASTIC. For sure, its in keeping with OFN values - and takes a different approach to procurement. Other platforms are out there looking for big suppliers - but we keep our focus on the many, the small, the ecological, the just …
So it would be reasonable to display them in the email as well. That’s a papercut. Do you want to write it up as issue? Do you want to fund that from the flower farms budget?
One more thought : we need to determine the scope of OFN in relation to the other software that business will use, mainly ERP I think. From my point of view it is a waste of time to try to generate delivery notes or legal invoices from OFN.
I am helping an integrator who is developping, using API, a link between OFN and Dolibarr, a versatile FOSS ERP that I personnally use and like very much. I think it could be great for OFN.
@maikel this is a very interesting idea - could the logic work within OFN, i.e. if a hub sells Carrots, then backorders are placed with other OFN suppliers to fulfill orders for Carrots? I’m thinking about this from the perspective of our UK procurement project starting shortly, for which we have funding for dev work, and I think this would be an excellent candidate. The suppliers will likely have OFN shopfronts, rather than Shopify, so if it were possible to do it with OFN suppliers and dodge Shopify that’d be great.
It could. This is not implemented yet but that’s what we want to do. I don’t think that the current DFC Orders project has more funding at the moment to do that. But the initial plans included OFN as the supplier platform as well and that part is easier. We estimated that at 7 dev days.