Create New Facility

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Creating your facilities is part of the opentaps system configuration, often performed by a System Administrator. The general method (using the server URL/Facility) is the most flexible and general method for creating facilities and fully describing them, but there are also end-user methods, that do not require System Administrator assistance. These end-user methods can be used for creating retail stores, web stores, warehouses, and backup warehouse facilities. These methods are located in various parts of the opentaps system related to each facility type, and we will explain each one of them in the following sections. We will discuss the general method first.

Using the General Method for Facilities

The general method uses a section of the system which is located at the following address on your opentaps server:

 /facility/control/login
 (Example of the address might be this type of URL: 
     https/your_server_name:port_number/facility/control/login).

*  Using your system URL, and port number, open the /facility/control/login page and 
      log in to the system 
*  The "Facility Manager Application" screen opens
*  The screen displays the Facilities List of all your current facilities 
     (stores and warehouses).
*  Click: [Create New Facility] the Facility (ID:) screen opens with a blank ID.  You can name
     the facility or let the system give it a numeric ID, but note these special rules: 
     ** Names are case sensitive
     ** Names cannot contain blank spaces -- use the underscore (_) instead of blanks
     ** Names must not contain special characters or punctuation marks (except the 
        dash (-) is acceptable.
     ** Incorrect names will cause system processes to fail, so if you are not certain, 
        let the system provide a numeric ID for you.
**  Select the Facility Type ID from the drop down box, for example "Warehouse"
**  Enter or look up the Owner = a unit of your company, or a Supplier
     who is listed in your system under Purchasing > Suppliers Tab if the facility is owned by
     the third party.
** Optionally enter a Default Weight Unit
** Select Default Inventory Item Type either serialized on non-serialized
** Supply a text Name for your new facility
** Optionally enter a Square Footage value for the facility
** Enter a Description if desired
** Enter the Default (lead time) Days To Ship from this facility after a request.
*  Click: [Update] to create the facility

The "Facility your-facility-name" page opens with a full set of facility defining tabs, but no other entries are required in this section of the system, at this time. Your facility has been created and you can return to this page to add or edit the various tabs provided.

Warehouse Setup

From the Main Navigation screen proceed to:

* Click: Warehouse Icon
* Click: [Create a New Warehouse]  link

to be continued

Backup Warehouse Setup

Refer to Backup Warehouses

opentaps Store Setup

The Store in opentaps is a database container for a group of your products sold together under the same policies. Your company can to set up multiple stores, each with its warehouses, fulfillment policies, currencies, languages, promotions, and look-and-feel. You can have stores in different countries with various different policies, shipping, taxation or other rules.

The stores you set up can be for the support of various real stores, such as web-based businss to business stores, or consumer e-commerce stores, or internal order entry applications, and also Point Of Sale applications.

To configure a Store, from the Main Navigation screen, proceed as follows:
Click: Catalog Icon > Stores Tab, the Product Store list opens, which is a table showing your
   existing Stores, and can be used to select one for editing.
Click: any Store Name (ID) in the table to edit all the properties of a working store. 
The "Store For your_store_name page" opens to the [Store] sub-tab showing a long list of store 
   attributes and several more tabs for administering different characteristics of that store.

On the [Store} sub-tab page, the following store attributes are provided for configuration of general Store properties:

• Primary Store Group ID -- What group, if any, this store belongs to. As explained in Setup Catagories, Catalogs, and Products stores can be grouped together with a unique product price for each store. It can be left blank if there are no store groups set up. Store groups must be set up by the Technical System Administrator using Main Navigation page > Webtools Icon > Webtools Tab > [Entity Data Maintenance] link.

• Store Name, Company name, Title, Sub-Title. Store related names and slogans used for display on the product store's website.

• Pay to Party Id -- The Party Group in your company for store sales transaction accounting, like payments.

• Days to Cancel Non Pay -- There is an automated service that can be scheduled (see Job Scheduler in Webtools) nightly to cancel orders which have not been paid. This defines how many days an order can be outstanding and unpaid before it is canceled. A value of zero here will leave all orders open indefinitely.

• Prorate Shipping -- Controls whether shipping charges from an order are billed fully to the first invoice of an invoice, or whether it is pro-rated on each invoice.
• Prorate Taxes -- Controls whether taxes for an order are billed fully to the first invoice of an invoice, or whether it is pro-rated on each invoice.

• View Cart On Add -- Controls whether the Customer or internal user of a web site will be shown the current shopping cart immediately after adding a product to the cart.
• Auto Save Cart --

• Auto Approve Reviews -- If the site allows users to enter product reviews, this controls whether the reviews must be approved or whether they are automatically shown on the site.

• Is Demo Store -- If the web site is a demo store any email routing goes to a demo store address which is configured in ????.

• Is Immediately Fulfilled -- ????

• Inventory Facility Id -- The inventory storage facility for the products sold on the store, and for the inventory accounting transactions.
• One Inventory Facility -- The system will use one (Y) or more (N) inventory facilities for the Store.
• Check Inventory -- Once an order is taken, this causes the store to check for inventory availability, and ????
• Reserve Inventory - Causes inventory to be reserved if available for items ordered in the store, and then allows Shipments to be created, and various order items to be assigned to the Shipments later. If there is no inventory on hand, new inventory items with negative quantities will be created for handling by the replenishment process (including any backup warehouse supply). Reserved inventory, which may still be on hand, is no longer available for other orders.
• Require inventory -- If set to (Y) products will automatically become unavailable when there is no inventory in the primary ???? facility.

• Reserve Order Enum ID -- Select how inventory should be selected for reservations from these options:
  • FIFO Expire – InventoryItem with earliest expireDate is reserved first.
  • FIFO Received (default) – Inventory items are reserved based on the date time received flag of Inventory Item. The earliest received item is reserved first.
  • Greater Unit Cost – InventoryItem with the highest unitCost is reserved first.
  • LIFO Expire – InventoryItem with the latest expireDate is reserved first.
  • LIFO Received – InventoryItem with latest date time received flag is reserved first.
  • Lesser Unit Cost – InventoryItem with the lowest unitCost is reserved first.

Note: the unit cost reservation methods do not do currency conversions.

• Requirement Method Enum -- Used to specify a default inventory requirements creation rule for the Store, when the requirement rule is not specified in the product specific data. Refer to Requirements for a complete discussion. If you use Material Resource Planning (MRP) then select "No Requirement Created" for this item.

• Order Number Prefix -- All orders placed on this Store will be prefixed by this string, which is useful for grouping orders from multiple stores.
• Default locale string -- Default locale, for language, number, and currency formats.
• Default Currency Uom ID -- Currency for the store transactions.
• Default sales channel -- Specify the default sales channel for the store orders, can be specified on each order as needed.

• Allow Password -- ????
• Default Password -- ????

• Explode Order Items -- ????

• Check Gc Balance -- ????

• Retry Failed Auths -- Determines whether failed charge card authorizations will be retried automatically.

• Header, Item, and Authorization Status Labels -- Specifies what the order header, order items status, and payment authorization status labels will display, when they are approved, declined, or canceled. These ten drop down boxes provide message options for each case.

• Style Sheet, Header Logo, and Background Links -- These links point to the style sheet, header logo, and background images to be used on the opentaps integrated Store web-site when it is being used.

• Show Prices with VAT -- Useful in countries where the price includes VAT. Set to (N) in the United States, where prices exclude sales tax.

Roles. Defines parties with specific roles for this store. For an employee to be able to take orders using the internal order manager application, he must be defined as a “Sales Representative” here.

Promos. Shows a list of active promotions for this store.

Catalogs. Catalogs which are available for the current store and the sequence in which they are to be shown to the user in a navigation menu.

Web Sites. Websites which are related to this store. This is directly used to link a store to a web application. Each web application has a configuration file called web.xml, and it is defined to reference a particular web site. The web site in turn is defined to relate to a product store. Thus, by setting a store on a web site, it becomes “live” on that web application.

It is possible for a web application to have more than one store associated with it, as long as it knows how to use the correct one.

The WebSite screen in Content Manager can be used to configure the static http and https content URLs and ports, so you can have your static content, such as images, served up by the Apache httpd server instead of the embedded Tomcat server.

Shipping. This page shows the shipping options available to store customers. A list of shipping options and their pricing is shown. Click on “View” for a shipping option shows all the settings for this shipping option. At this point, this tab can only view shipping options available and not be used to define them.

Payment. This is used to set up payment processing for the store. The payment processing interfaces are defined as services. Each payment method will have a series of service types available to it, such as for authorizing, capturing, and refunding payment. This page links the payment types and the services together by their purpose. Thus, one service would be used for credit card authorizations, another for credit card capture, and so forth.

Emails. This defines emails which the store would send to customers. The actual email services are either mounted in the controller, such as the order confirmation email, or from scheduled services, such as back order notifications. This page defines where the template for the email is located on the file system, the addresses and subject of each email, and a content type (which can be left blank.)

Surveys. This page is for adding surveys to the store. Surveys can be associated with certain events or with products and categories.

Setting Up Multiple Stores

It is possible to set up multiple stores in the system which sell the same products on different websites. (This is different than setting up completely separate companies with their own products and customers—opentaps is not a mall like Yahoo stores.) To set up multiple stores, you would need to:

1. Create multiple Product Stores in the Catalog Manager
2. Create catalogs and associate them with your stores
3. Create WebSites in the content manager, and associate those Websites with your ProductStores.
4. Copy the online store in applications/ecommerce/ to separate directories to your hotdeploy directory, 
      one for each store
5. For each of your stores, edit its webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml file and change the webSiteId to point to one 
      of the WebSites you defined for your ProductStore.
6. You can edit base/config/ofbiz-containers.xml to set up different Tomcat servers or

AJP13 listeners on different ports, and then configure each of your stores to use a different server in its ofbiz-component.xml file. At this point, each store can be configured to its own IP address or web URL.