Hello friends
I will want to share my practical experience about problem of service industry and solution to handle it.
Mostly service industry doing annual maintenance contract to provide fixed no of visits for preventive maintinence during contract period and also visit on call basis. To keep track of all contract and managing people to execute these contracts is very difficult. I have not found any ideal solution for such type of requirement.
Recently I had think to use webERP for such requirement in different way. You may also find my approach helpful to develop better solution.
Case No-1
One customer is having 500 branches under one control office,customer wants that on every month each branch should be visited and there must be a more than 20 days difference in each visit. after completing montly visit bill will be submit to control office alongwith service report.
Solution
1- I have treated one branch contract as a item and created 500 such serialised controlled items.
2- I have created whole contract of 500 branch as a item (kit)
3- Enter the BOM of above kit item i.e 500 seperate branches, no of visit is treated as item qty. Now i can generate a sakes order of whole contract (500 branch) kit item. It will explode all branch details ,qty ,price , tax etc
4- I have make our technician as supplier
5- I will generate purchase order to our technician for making visit to branches, I could also put estimated cost of expenses of branch visit.
6- after completing visit to customer our technician will submit service report alongwith actual expense report, i will receive all this against issued p.o
7- Now I have service report of visited branch in our inventory.
8- now I can generate invoice against previously generated sales order.
9- if any vist not completed then it will be list of back ordered
all reports related to pending visits, expenses in executing visits, payment, invoicing will be availabe as usual, such type of manipulation will helpful to handle service related controls till dedicated solution not available.
I will hope that developer of Frontaccounting will use this idea to make refined solution for service industry.
