Monday, January 9, 2012

ABC Analysis in OpenERP

Author & Courtesy : ERP Moldeo

ABC analysis is very well covered in this Wikipedia article. So no point of talking about it again here. Thing is, how do you implement it in OpenERP.

Polish OpenERP screenshot
Image via Wikipedia


Truth is, it is not a great deal. You only need to pull the sale order lines for the past six months (for example, could be a year as well or the period under analysis), then by product summarize its sales (not taking into account any discounts) and then divide the sales number by the total sales amount, in order to figure out the product ABC Category. If you are an experienced programmer or data analyst, you can do this in minutes. If not, does not take long to figure out how to query the OpenERP database.


Thing is, this information is not integrated into OpenERP yet (and it makes sense, since you do not need this information for the MRP application. It’s nice to have it, but it is not critical). So I created a module that regularly categorizes OpenERP products according to its sales. I have not finished it yet and I need to upload it to LaunchPad, but I think I will do it this week.


What does this module do? Allows you to create ABC categories (you can have as many as you want) where you define the category and its range. Then regularly (as an scheduler action) categorizes the products taking into account their sales lines. Then updates the product abc_category field (created previously by the module installer).


I still need to polish the module and add a couple of files, such as a XML file with initial information (specially for the scheduler and categories). As soon as I get it done, I will upload it to LaunchPad and publish it.

Cheers!!!!

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