[ic] Self-Serve Supplier Admin Mod

[Dog Tags]

Hi All

When we take orders, we split up the orders according to suppliers, and then we contact the suppliers with the order number, customer shipping info, and items. Then, the suppliers ship out their stuff to the customer.

Right now, we have to manually sort out each order and then contact the suppliers, then wait to hear from the suppliers that they have shipped the orders, and then we update the orders, etc. It's a lot of steps on our end.

Instead, what we would like to do is allow our suppliers to access the orders through a separate Supplier Admin section, check to see what items they should ship out, and then also allow them to update the online order history.

In a sense, we want to create a Self-Serve Supplier Admin system, in which the supplier would simply login, check for orders, and take care of the whole thing soup to nuts. All we would have to do, then, is update the customer data.

Here are some of the things as we see it now:

1. Supplier data would be kept in a separate database so that any mistakes they made would not affect our core customer data.

2. Suppliers could see just their own part of an order, not the whole order. So, if an order involves two or more suppliers, then Supplier A can only view the part of that order that involves items from Supplier A, not Supplier B or anyone else.

3. The data displayed to the Suppliers would be Order ID, sku's of their item(s) only, customer shipping data (not billing data), item descrip, item quantity, date ordered, status of each of their items (backordered, shipped, etc.), and maybe a date field to indicate when the Supplier shipped the item(s)

4. As the suppliers shipped out items and updated their database, then our support personnel would see this indicated in a box next to the order status boxes currently existing in IC admin. So, our support person would login and then see that order # 1234 had items A, B, and C shipped. 

5. Then, our support person could update the customer order data to reflect the Supplier data. This would allow the customer to login and see the update that items A, B, and C have been shipped. The Supplier update itself would not update the customer order data. That would have to be done by our person

6. The Supplier would be able to get a Printable list of the day's orders, or they could even get some delimited flatfile output if they wanted. This could be very flexible to suit the Supplier.

7. The Supplier's order history could be kept for X period, like 1-2 months online, as determined by admin.

And more stuff, I'm sure...

The whole idea is to create a system in which the Supplier's pretty much take care of everything themselves. This would free up our personnel to concentrate on customer contact. All our support people would have to do is check to see whether the orders have been shipped and update the customer order data.

Would anyone know how to get started doing this kind of project? This could be a great addition to IC.

Thanks very much. :-)
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