within the company, a supplier, a customer, and so forth. Information that describes Parties or is directly
related to Parties is contained in these entities.
One type of related data is Contact Mechanisms such as postal addresses, phone numbers, email
addresses, internet URLs. Another is Roles that the Party acts in such as Customer, Supplier, Employee,
Manager, Merchandiser, etc. Generally a single party will interact with different parts of the system in
many different roles.
Another type of data that fits into the Party category is information about communication and
agreements between Parties. This gets into the area of relationship management and also includes
information about issues or trouble tickets that a Party may have. These entities are used along with the
Work Effort entities to plan and track the research and resolution of such issues.
Product
The Product entities contain information about products that are for sale or for use within a company.
Products can be goods or services and there are various types of goods including raw materials,
subassemblies and finished goods. Product information includes descriptive information about the
products but is not used for describing actual instances (where applicable) or physical goods, that is
where Inventory Items come into play. An Inventory Item contains information about where a particular
good is located, the status of the item, and a serial number for serialized items or quantity on hand and
available to promise amounts for non-serialized inventory.
Products can be organized into Product Categories. A single product can be a member of multiple
categories and even categories themselves can be children of multiple categories and can have multiple
child categories. Products can also be associated with one another to designate concepts such as
variants, cross-sells, up-sells, marketing packages, etc.
Categories can be associated with different Catalogs. A Product Catalog is essentially a starting point for
all information about a particular set of products to be sold. Promotions and inventory management
options are associated with each catalog so that different sales channels can behave differently even
with the same set of underlying products.
To flexibly model different types of features that products often have there are entities for defining types
of features and actual features that can be applied to products. For instance, you might say that this shirt
is a size large and is a blue colored shirt. Size and color are types of features and large and blue are
actual features applied to the specific shirt product.
Multiple prices can be associated with a single product, as can multiple costs. Different prices can be
specified for different currencies, different sets of facilities (or stores), and for different date ranges.
This is a good place to introduce the wide-spread use of effective dating in OFBiz. There are two fields
commonly used to express effective dates: fromDate and thruDate. In the product price example the
fromDate and thruDate are used to denote that a price goes into effect on a certain date and at a certain
time and expires at a certain date and time. This can be used to keep a history of price changes, and to
