Stacks and the Acquisitions Small Group have been working on updates to the vendors module in the test environment
A major area of work includes reviewing all fields and determining characteristics such as whether they are required or repeatable and whether they can be searched or filtered by.
Vendors is not ready for a walk through yet, because we are still waiting on test data for this module
Test data should be available within the next couple of weeks; Dennis will schedule a walk through then
Finance
Dennis is expecting this module to be released to test within the next week or so
The group is also reviewing field parameters for this module
The group will also work on creating test data for Finance
Cancellations
The Acq Small Group met with some experts on this topic
They are working on a mockup to share to Discuss
Payments
The group also meet with some experts to talk about whether a PO and invoice should be required for every payment
The decision was that a payment needs to reference either a PO or an invoice. It does not have to reference both, although it can and likely will in most cases
They will publish a summary on Discuss for comment
Instances
The group has discussed the question of whether an order must be linked to an instance in inventory
The initial feeling is that if there are purchases that are relevant to acquisitions only, they should not require an inventory record – one example might an Amazon Prime subscription
Interaction with ERM
Following WolfCon, the Acq Small Group has identified some next steps for discussing the detail of how orders and ERM will interact
They will follow up with the ERM group in a couple weeks
Contacts and organizations
Currently, contacts are stored on the vendor record
Based on the WolfCon discussion, vendors may need to be decoupled from contacts slightly
ERM will need to reference people and organizations who are not necessarily vendors
The groups will need to identify when and how this should be done
Batch loader
The batch loader group has been working on requirements for bringing information from vendor systems into FOLIO
They've been outlining use cases from the acq and cataloging points of view
The goal is to complete requirements by the end of June
Orders API
Ann-Marie and Dennis have also been working with GOBI on designing an API that will allow real time transfer of data between FOLIO and vendor systems via an API
We can also talk with reps from Harrassowitz and WT Cox about their interest
We will still need to support the MARC approach, which is still used by many vendors
EDI
We will tackle loading EDIFACT invoices as the first step in implementing EDI