Relations between modules

[KatarzynaUlichnowska]

Depending on the internal processes of a company, different relations between modules are important. For example, I would like to be able to associate a Service with a Lead, Organization, Opportunity and Project. It should be possible to relate any module to any module (using the Arrange Related Types function).

[KatarzynaUlichnowska]

status: pending
Comment from YetiForce:
I took part in over 200 deployments. This experience causes that I look differently at some aspects. In my opinion, the logics of the system are very important, and the attempt to keep them distorts next processes and influences their comprehension negatively. We try to predict and create universal solutions. However, creating arbitrary relations isn’t practical and healthy. Currently, we gave the possibility:
to create a 1:M relation from layouteditor level,
to disable existing relations.
There is still the possibility to create relations from the file level (a few lines of code), so adding more mechanisms will create chaos. In your example I point to the fact that you would like to add a relation Services <> Lead, Organization, Opportunity but this relation already exists.
Surely, we need considered examples in order to understand what seems incomprehensible at first.

[KatarzynaUlichnowska]

Comment from Claude:
The issue is that different organization have different business processes for their sales activities. For example, for what reason should it not be possible to associate costs with a service contract, but with a project? Idem with leads, to give just some examples.
The problem with the current system is that a lot of the module dependencies are hard-coded which is very painful to manage (and maintain).

[bpabiszczak]

Unfortunately, most customers have exactly the same processes. The problem is that we often don’t know how to explain it to a customer. Every sales process should be carried out by an Opportunity, everything what has been sold, should be carried out through a Project. It often happens, that new modules (e.g. cars for insurance companies, Power Generation Point for the energy sector) need to be added in those processes, however the processes are the same, it may lack some marketing or production processes.

Costs should be assigned to processes (marketing, sales, projects, tickets) and there should be a summary on Service Contracts (as it is now). We have written out the processes and we are going to improve and update them. If you want us to change something (we plan to change a lot of things and the processes will change significantly), you would have to explain why you think this process isn’t optimal and how it should be changed.

In the future, we are going to add more tools that will allow to manage all of this from a panel, but it is more complicated than you think, because Vtiger hard-wired it in many places.

I don’t know how I can help you with this issue.