Will OFBiz serve my hw-logistics-tracking project well?

[Matt England]

Summary:

I'm trying to determine if OFBiz might be able to solve some our
product-hardware-logistics management and other needs.  Many more details
follow.  If not OFBiz, can anyone offer any other open-sourced,
software-package suggestions?  We are also looking at osCommerce,
AgoraCart, and LiteCommerce.  However, on the first pass, OFBiz seems to be
the most-robust offering.

We're also not sure that any of these solutions offer anything close to
what we need.  We fear that our "internal logistics" needs are possibly not
served well by the "external-order focused" solutions that I list
above.  In other words: I'm not even sure I'm in the right universe.  Hence
I write this note to see if I am or am not going down the correct path.  If
the general community response is that I _am_ in the write place, I plan to
digest documents like http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBIZ/Is+OFBiz+for+Me 
to learn more.

Finally, if no open-sourced package offers what we seek, I invite anyone to
provider pointers to lower-cost (as in less than $5k list price) packages
that might server our needs.


More Details:

I'm working on a project with several people that requires some sort of
product-hardware-logistics management system that can also provide
automation for post-sales customer support, product-configuration
management (i.e., put multiple product component combinations together,
analyze their costs and benefits to determine which configuration to use)
and similar things.

We are currently managing these things in a rather manual fashion using
Excel spreadsheets.  However, we'd like to move to a more-robust and
flexible, multi-user system that would presumably web-on-top-of-database based.

We have in the past created our own custom software for our own internal
needs for related things; for this project, we take significant pause, for
this appears to be a big job, and we suspect existing software packages may
solve some or at least part of our challenges.  Further, we are hoping said
software packages might offer extensible interfaces and/or provide an
open-source license, both things that might allow us to build on top of an
already established "platform."

Our project produces a digital-hardware product (it's basically a network
device) whose components are all out-sourced from other vendors.  I provide
a few high-level (and somewhat ambiguous) requirements for our system:

* The product is comprised of components from multiple electronics-hardware
vendors
* We offer one main product with multiple configurations today, but plan
multiple product lines in the near future
* We do not yet see a significant need to automate the ordering process
such that a customer can place an order on the web and a factor starts
automatically building an associated product.  We are producing
high-ticket-item products without a large volume of orders (at least to
start) and are not concerned about the manual overhead to handle each
order.  Rather, we are concerned about all of the "product-management
configuration/design" stuff to determine which configurations to order, how
to drive down costs, etc.
* We want to track serial numbers for each product for pre- and post-sales
support purposes
* We offer many different combinations of components (varying in
size/quality/number of components as well as different vendors for same
components) for each product line
* We plan to analyze various component combinations for lowest cost, best
quality, and varying requirements
* We want to track ongoing cost changes for each component
* We want to track orders to customers through this system, including
mappings  of customer IDs to product serial numbers.  We may also want to
track the serial numbers (provide by the providing vendors) of product
components contained within each product instance.
* This system needs to interface with a post-sales service part of our
project; eg, a customer calls up, provides a product serial number, and we
can quickly tell if said product is covered with any service plan.
* We want to track shipping and receiving for our inbound components from
vendors as well as the products we deliver to our customers
* We want to track product-change history; eg, some product components are
field replaceable, and we'd like the system to track these replacements and
other, similar things.

These "requirements" are not meant to be exhaustive, but are rather
designed to provide a taste of what we seek.

For what it's worth: I'm not familiar with the exact context of automation
systems terms like:

ERP - planning
CRM - customer management
eCommerce
SCM
MRP
CMMS/EAM
Point_of_sale

(a list I acquired from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OFBiz#Overview 
).  I have of course heard of all these things and even used said systems,
but I honestly don't know *exactly* what each means, the classical
capability boundaries of each system, etc.  Basically, I'm not familiar
with the lingo and the associated requirements/operational space of each
system...in case that wasn't already painfully clear.  ;)  I can read any
of these references in more detail if anyone can care to point me in the
right direction (in the interest of my not reading _everything_) and saving
me a bit of time.

Thanks for any help,
-Matt