One Master Product Catalogue - Many POS Different Locations

[tbcomputerguy]

Ok, firstly not sure which section to put this in. I couldn't pick one so i started here. Admins please move it to an appropriate category if you wish.  Anyhow, I was approached by a friend that asked me if this can be done in Filemaker.  His plan is to have one master database of inventory that many different vendors will have access to but only to change their or add their own products.  Then say in city one we have a store with a pos system (Filemaker). They will manage their own products in that store, but still have access to the master product catalogue if you will, to look up products that one or many vendors may sell.   So the POS systems are separate from each other as they are their own store.  Yet any of them can access the master database and put in purchase orders to order products from the various sellers.  One problem i see is once a store owner orders various products from this master database..i'm told will have about 10000 items, without sending separate purchase orders to each vendor, how on earth will the store owner receive the products they require.  I guess i could have it generate a list of items ordered and create purchase orders based on vendorid.  as soon as the vendor id changes, create a new one and script emailing it.  I guess my question is can something like this be done and would I have to store this master db on the cloud, or just a fm server someplace. 

Dave

Edited April 24, 2018 by tbcomputerguy

[OlgerDiekstra]

Sure, FileMaker can drive something like this. You could use its new API to pull and push requests (using JSON for instance). Create vendor logins and track for each products which vendor is the owner.

A cloud based service might be the way to go, but in the end the cloud server is just a fm server someplace. The thing to consider when self hosting is can you (do you want to) ensure it's uptime? It may not be an issue, if all vendors access the system only during certain hours within the same timezone, you only need to worry about 9 to 5 or something. But if they are across many timezones, things get more complicated.

10,000 items is nothing. Things to consider though is performance across WAN/Internet. Depending on how well the DB is designed, pulling a list from the central DB could take a while. But you could create an automated after hrs sync and only sync changed items. Realisticly, how often do products change? Probably not daily, certainly not all products.