Hi !
At first, I though that using the ean13 barcode as an unique reference to a product was a good choice. If you have two or more suppliers, you can't rely on their own reference to check if a product already exist or not in database. So the ean13 barcode came in mind, and I wrote a bunch of code relying on it.
But, what if the ean13 barcode is missing when the supplier gives you his list of product (let's say in a csv file) ? What if some barcodes are wrong, duplicated, wih only zero, ... ? That's when things start to going bad.
How do you handle this ?
Edit: I'm aware of the technical features openERP can gives us. I'm not asking for technical support, but for support on conceptual stuff.
I've though a lot on this, so I wanted to know how you people managed your data. How do you figure out if a product from supplier A is the same as a product from supplier B ? I think the barcode is the simplest way, but when your supplier gives you wrong barcodes, what workaround are you building ? Perhaps it's a confidential information, valuable or whatever, I don't know, I'm not an expert in information. Thanks anyway.
The book industry set up - since a long time - a common barcoding system named ISBN. Each book editor prints the code on the cover sheet. This is true for miilions of printed products over the world. The ISBN code is public and companies like Amazon refer to it. We daily refer to a db with 600 000 unique products, most of them with ISBN We would like Odoo to support ISBN (and its derivative ISMN (for notated music scores)) in addition/alternative to the EAN13.