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.
As mentionned above by @nicotentin, there is a small city in France that is willing to use OFN for public food procurement.
We have been working with them for some years now. We have reached this point :
Around 20 local farmers (among 50 spotted producers) have their catalog on the platform. Unfortunately they use very rare the online shops.
A group on the platform with all these farmers and the shops.
We said with the project leader in this city that we will meet online in the second half of August and we aim to be ready for a public communication and launch in February 2026.
Regarding this new step they want to do with food procurement, I have been searching about OFN UK project in Wales. And I am wondering now how this can be integrated / implemented in France.
Is there a demo we could use?
Or could build our own demo tool based on the work you did?
If dev work is needed, does someone who worked on the UK project could be interested? And if so, can you estimate how much time and money is needed?
After reading the exchange between @maikel and @BethanOFN above, is there a choice to do between the integration you already made for Wales and DFC? => I have no opinion about technical choices but 1) the easier the better 2) the cheaper the better.
In your view, what are the best next step to take?
The needs are not expressed clearly except that they want to have more local produce cooked in school meals and that they will have to supply from different producers for the same product (which is a feature existing in the tool that was developed by OFN UK)
I’m thinking to prepare a set of questions for the project leader in order to clarify what they want to do.
Can you confirm if these questions are good or if something is missing / or not necessary to know:
how many buyers
how many shipping points
how often purchases are made
how many products
same price for every farmer or each farmer decides its prices
And @franciscomartinez as you said on Slack, can you give a sign here if you see a funding that could match?
Hi @berengere.batiot apologies for the delayed reply. The integrations I built for the Wales project were unique to both hub’s requirements for aggregating produce so may be a little specialised but you’re very welcome to use them. One let their suppliers choose their prices, then decided what to charge customers based on averaging across supplier price, whilst the other wanted to use the national average wholesale prices published online by the government and the Soil Association for organic produce. You can take a look at a supplier defined prices demo document here and the wholesale average demo document here. I can happily make a copy and share with you for tweaking for your own purposes, but we went with this ‘off platform’ approach as it was a short timescale project and this was the quicker and cheaper option!
We have budget as part of the Procurement For Good project we’re now working on to make developments to aid growers and hubs. I am trying to work with the involved hubs to spec out what we focus on with the development but trying to engage busy hub staff & growers is proving just as challenging as on the last project! I am hesitant to rush and build something that isn’t needed and waste the budget Another option I am considering is whether UI/UX improvements for the shopfront would be beneficial to pull in and keep more public buyers with a smooth purchasing process
@maikel a couple of questions regarding DFC logic - if we were to extend it inside of OFN as discussed above, I’m guessing all linked products would have to be the same price (so we’d need suppliers to agree to be paid the same price per kg for example?). This would affect your questions Berengere! I am also wondering how the backordering would work if three suppliers offered carrots and a buyer needed more than one grower’s available stock but less than the total available - how would the logic split the order between the available growers? I’m assuming these are questions we’d need to explore if we went down this DFC extension route rather than already exist in the logic but please correct me if not Maikel
A couple more questions for your project leader:
Are buyers restrictive with their variety requirements (e.g. would only purchase Cavalo Nero, not curly kale)?
Are buyers willing to use an online ordering system e.g. going through the OFN front-end?
The current implementation doesn’t aggregate multiple products into one. If there were three farmers offering potatoes then the shop would list three different potato products. You could choose which ones you want to buy but stock may run out during the order cycle and then you can choose only the ones that still have stock.
thanks for your reply @BethanOFN@maikel
For me, the most important is that the buyers can buy the appropriate quantity of produce and that it’s made easy for them.
Like for example, a buyer needs to be clear and able to track that he bought 30 kg potatoes even if it’s from 3 different producers. It means he or she needs an easy way to call for these 30 kg, then purchase them (for me, no problem if he has to choose between different producers) and then have a report or other document confirming he will have the 30 kg delivered.
@BethanOFN how could we do some tests with the integration you made in order to check if it could help in our user case?
If your producers are all charging different prices and it’s not a problem for a buyer to choose between producers, I don’t think the integrations I built will be useful - they were designed to a.) apply nationally published pricing to producers’ products automatically or b.) to aggregate produce from multiple producers into a single ‘off platform’ stock list that could be emailed to them directly, with customers then placing orders over the phone with the hub for instance. The template/demo versions I linked above will show you how they work so have a look, and if they do seem useful let me know and I can create copies for you to adapt
Another option I am considering is whether UI/UX improvements for the shopfront would be beneficial to pull in and keep more public buyers with a smooth purchasing process