Question about Advanced Stock Management System

[Nordicworming]

Good day! I'm having some little issues with the Advanced Stock Management and most definitely would need some advice because I'm stuck. Probably I'm simply misunderstanding something. So back to my now usual worm example, for I'm selling those as well as worm compost.

I have worms for bait and composting. I created two products, containing 1 worm each. Then I have packs, containing x times 1 worm (30 bait worms, 100 compost worms...) as a product. I added 10'000 bait and 10'00 compost in the ASMS but somehow when I set the product pack to uses ASMS, it doesn't seem to use the stock I added but, instead, added more products that I need to restock in the ASMS because system says there's no sock.

What am I doing wrong and/or misunderstanding here?

Thanks and greetings from Finland :smile:

[lesley]

@haylau ASM is not meant to be an ERP. I think this is the common misconception about what ASM is.

Here are some use cases in my view of ASM

Say you have 2 warehouses, one in Germany and one in Switzerland. Someone orders a widget from Switzerland. The ASM system figure out where the widget ships from. Say in Switzerland to Switzerland you offer free shipping. But from Germany to Switzerland you offer 3 euro shipping. The ASM system figures out where the product ships from and charges that amount.

Another use case in my mind is say you have a store in Bern and a store in Munich. I am in Munich, I want to buy widget x, I get on your site and see if widget x is available at the Munich store.

[Briljander]

Ok, but if you want better warehouse management and therefor need to install an third party module you are often required to turn off ASM cause the other module will be the one that handles the stock and only syncs the output to Prestashop.

Also the supply order doesn't help in the way it's designed right now. It's a faster to use paper and pencil or excel.

I understand that TB might only handle the e-commerce part but then I think you can remove a lot of the features in ASM and stay with the part you described.

Maybe you should also make it more clear what ASM is meant to be as you described.

[lesley]

We are planning some changes to it in future versions, I do think some things will get removed and some will get added in.

[rubben1985]

Something I always missed in ASM was to be able to see in what orders a product has been sold. You can see movements but no order is identified. Another thing is to reset the quantities of specific products. Sometimes ASM makes some mistakes and the different available quantities ("available", "real"...) are not correct. Being able to put to zero and add the actual stock, could be very helpful.

[Briljander]

@haylau How can you keep track of you stock if it's not synced with your e-commerce?

[haylau]

@briljander In a very very complex way :)

Problem for us is that we manufacture. We manufacture and sell finished products but also sell the raw materials. Also a lot of our trade is offline (trade accounts), some on ebay, some on Amazon some on ManoMano, now on Amazon Vendor programme

So I have lots of databases and spreadsheets, and storemanager running via task schedulers and crons to fire off syncs every hour or two

An absolute nightmare to be honest. And I am certain when I leave the company, the whole thing will grind to a halt

[Smile]

I really think that the way it is solved in PS 1.7 is nice for most users. One tab to manage all stock and see where it is. From there it could be elaborated. But in Most cases People will move to a WMS or ERP or a combination... This saying I would rather see a separate WMS module and ERP/CRM module. Because in my case I need order picking with handhelds ect...

[lesley]

I have been looking at an ERP company to partner with, but in the end we are going to keep advanced stock management, just change it a bit. It is a feature that needs to be in the core so stores can grow in the use cases I mentioned.

[dosbiner]

@rubben1985 said in Question about Advanced Stock Management System:

Something I always missed in ASM was to be able to see in what orders a product has been sold. You can see movements but no order is identified. Another thing is to reset the quantities of specific products. Sometimes ASM makes some mistakes and the different available quantities ("available", "real"...) are not correct. Being able to put to zero and add the actual stock, could be very helpful.

I second that, really need this features. Another one is this bug https://github.com/thirtybees/thirtybees/issues/504

[led24ee]

Hi. Is anybody using advanced stock management and this is also working too ? I just tried with fresh install and I have no idea how this thing must work. First if I make an supply order then I must set supplier. Until this it's ok. Now when I start to put products on this order then I try to use reference and in this list there are products from different supplier. When I finally give up and put this product from different supplier and hit "Save and stay" then I got error message which tells me that almost every field must be filled. This last error is gone with TB1.1. bleeding edge. But. I still can't use reference code, I must use supplier reference. I also found out that there is SQL table product_attribute and there is row supplier_reference. This is empty and stays empty when importing products via CSV. Maybe this must be empty but in this case I can't understand why this column after all is existing.

[the.rampage.rado]

I use it without suply orders.

[led24ee]

In every stock increasing You make new stock movement ? I mean when You order 100 items then You make 100 movement ? With supply order You can say that all items are here and rest is done after one click.

[the.rampage.rado]

I don't have 100 products per shipping so that's easier... :)

 

[led24ee]

3 minutes ago, the.rampage.rado said:

I don't have 100 products per shipping so that's easier... 🙂

 

Lucky You ...

[led24ee]

I give up with this ASM. I just spent about hour to make an supply order and in final this thing just tripled some quantity. This need very serious work. Of course meanwhile there was error 500 also, but I was lucky to resolve this (product name was too long. I can't understand why this wasn't problem when product was created.)

[wakabayashi]

9 hours ago, led24ee said:

I give up with this ASM.

That's sad. But I am not totally suprised, tbh. A few years ago we started also to use ASM and had multiple issues. Some were fixed. We use the supply order almost daily now and it saves us a lot time.

In general you sould report all bugs you find on github. These days bugs are fixed in quite a short time compared to two years ago. But if the devs, don't know the bug, they can never fix something like ASM...

[led24ee]

In general I can also found another platform too.

[wakabayashi]

1 hour ago, led24ee said:

In general I can also found another platform too.

Thats also possible 🙂 Have you already one in mind, that works better? 

[led24ee]

Just now, wakabayashi said:

Thats also possible 🙂 Have you already one in mind, that works better? 

Not yet. But why is this forum if solution is to put this in github ? I try to not use ASM, but i have no idea why there must be exist possibility which is useless or if this is working then I can't use this option because I'm too stupid or I expect too much. Unfortunately I'm no so skilled to fix this. If I remember correctly then there wasn't problem in TB 1.0.4 and when 1.1 was ready I think that this is better.

[wakabayashi]

Every forum is choatic, thats why bug reports don't work good here. In github you open an issue and state clearly what is the problem and how a dev can reproduce the issue. It's not about you are too stupid. There are really multiple bugs. I have already reported and fixed some of them.

It's simple: If you post it on github chances are high, that it will be fixed. If you just post a problem here, chances are high, that it won't be fixed.

[Briljander]

And if you need a better supplyorder module there are paid modules. They're not perfect either but work better. I have already given up on the original features in Prestashop/TB.

[wakabayashi]

58 minutes ago, Briljander said:

I have already given up on the original features in Prestashop/TB.

That's a sad story. But it confirms my impression, that ASM is not usable for a non-coding merchant. At least your (@Briljander and @led24ee) Story shows, that you would need such ASM features too. For our store supply orders are a very critical part. If we can automate them, we will have clear advantage over our competitors. 

[Briljander]

5 hours ago, wakabayashi said:

That's a sad story. But it confirms my impression, that ASM is not usable for a non-coding merchant. At least your (@Briljander and @led24ee) Story shows, that you would need such ASM features too. For our store supply orders are a very critical part. If we can automate them, we will have clear advantage over our competitors. 

Yeah, you can read @lesley earlier answer in this thread. Don't think there have been any changes since that post. 

We did some investigation to turn off all ASM and let another cloudsoftware take care of everything. We did try some out but ended up buying Prestashop ERP module from Boostmyshop. We then put some money in and let them develop the most critical features for us (which is also available for everyone else in latest versions). 

We also tried to get some new features developed recently but the price was a little bit too high (about 2000 EUR) to take all by ourselves. So it's the best option we have so far but we are stuck with a module which doesn't seem to get updated that much and also to expensive to develop further on our own.

[Pedalman]

And it helps me (better helped since I abandoned ASM years ago due to constanst trouble with it) to controll stock update orders I do. I seldomly receive the amount of articles I ordered to sell and I can remember that ASM gave me here some more controll. May be I only thought so OO

[wakabayashi]

8 minutes ago, Pedalman said:

And it helps me (better helped since I abandoned ASM years ago due to constanst trouble with it) to controll stock update orders I do. I seldomly receive the amount of articles I ordered to sell and I can remember that ASM gave me here some more controll. May be I only thought so OO

Yeah that's true. In ASM you have different values for stock (real_quantitiy, physical_quantity and usable quantity). We also never get complete orders. In ASM supply orders you can add part deliveries. I really don't remember, what works out of the box and what did I implement for us. But stock management is so critical for us, that I invest a lot of time in it. Next project is, to use barcode scanner and change to chaotic storage system.