Manufacturer Information (Address, Email, Phone #, etc)

We currently have an internal application that we use to track our manufacturers, purchase orders with them for their various products, along with their detailed information - addresses, phone numbers, fax, websites, etc.

Has anyone built some of this into their nop sites?  When I add manufacturers in nop, I only see basic information - Name, Description, etc.  We could add the description field to contain all the other information, but that isn't a very good way to go.  

Basically, I'd like to get rid of the separate internal desktop application and just have all our data & information stored in one place.  Is this design not recommended?  How are other people doing this currently?

Thanks!

~Gearard

Gearard wrote:

I don't know what does your internal application do but in my case I have developed a task control in nopcommerce. It runs automatically every night and update my stock according to my requirements and if there is any price change in any product, emails me that. This is my website http://www.just4laptops.co.uk. We do store lots of products but some of products have to be dropshipped so I use this method to update in realtime.

The suppliers upload their product feed to their ftp and the task I have developed simply login to their ftp and download the file and then open the file, read it and update my stock.

I suppose you could do something like this.

Thanks AtiqUr.  That might be a good enhancement for me to add to ours in terms of updating information regarding prices live from the manufactuers, or at least the ones that offer that type of feed..

As for storing the manufacturer's metadata (addresses - street addresses, emails, phone numbers, etc.) I've modified the admin manufacturer detail view to include a tab for Addresses along with a corresponding ManufacturerAddress table in the database. I'm now in the process of adding another tab "Purchase Orders" so that I can view our purchase orders (as opposed to orders from our customers to us) with manufacturers so that everything is in one place.  

With a few other similar modifications & enhancements, I should be able to retire our internal application and have everything in a single place, with the added benefit of being able to access it to view, edit, generate reports, etc. remotely via the site's admin section rather than needing to have the desktop app and the server it was using on the local network available...

~Gearard