Open Source ERP Guru

Customers and Products in open source ERP

The two building blocks of every commercial entity are products and customers.

In our last post we created a new customer in Openbravo – one of the leading open source ERP solutions. In this post we will talk about products in ERP systems and learn how to create a product in Openbravo. As always, a flash tutorial will show you exactly how it looks like inside Openbravo’s beautiful UI.

Once we have a customer and a product, we can create our first sales order. Next post will guide you through the process of creating a sales order in Openbravo. Then, we will move on to another leading open source ERP software – Compiere.

Just like we did with Openbravo, we will do an initial Compiere setup,create a customer and a product, followed by a sales order. We will follow this procedure through several other open source ERP solutions, creating flash tutorials for each solution. I believe it will provide valuable insight to those of you who are looking to compare different open source ERP solutions – you will be able to read and run the flash tutorial,side by side, of all the leading open source ERP solution,without leaving this site!

But our current discussion is around products in ERP software in general and in Openbravo in particular.

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In our last Openbravo post, we created a Client in our Openbravo system. We will now move on to create our first customer.

ERP Business Partner

A customer is a type of Business Partner.In an ERP system,business partner is a generic term used for several object types – customer,vendor,employee,contact person etc. All these object types have several properties in common,mainly a name ( either First and Last name or Company name) and an address. Many ERP system take an object oriented approach toward managing business partners by enabling you define properties that are generic to all different objects (e.g. name and address) in the business partner level and only then maintain information which is specific to a certain type of business partner – for example, for a vendor we would need the vendors’ bank account details, while for a customer we might need to maintain a ship-to and bill-to addresses. That approach also enables you to use the same business partner record for both vendor and customer, without having to maintain two completely separate records, one for each type.

Read entire article to watch the flash tutorial for business partner creation in Openbravo.

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One of the important things for many of my blog’s readers is to get an initial feeling on how each open source ERP solution looks and feels.

Therefore, I will start adding flash clips along with some of the tutorials I am writing. The first flash tutorial I made is a recording showing how to create an initial Client in Openbravo open source ERP.
If you plan to follow the flash to create you first Openbravo Client, you should also read the original guide.

I am still working on getting the flash clip to play full screen properly. I would really appreciate comments – on flash clip playing speed,size of screen,level of details or any other suggestion.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/InitialSetupOpenbravo.swf" height="250" width="427" play="false"/]

To view the flash ERP tutorial in a larger screen, click on “Read Complete Article”

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One of our readers, Chris, commenting on Open Source ERP Activity Trends, had some very good questions and I decided to answer them, one by one, in a dedicated post.

Q: Is Opensource integral to the success of companies like Compiere and Openbravo, or is it more a marketing tool?

A: I’ll start by answering the latter part of the question – definitely NO!, it’s not a marketing tool. All open source projects start with a genuine intention of making things better. Programmers grouping together to write a piece of software for no money, usually in their spare time (after working 10 hours for their commercial employer) don’t think about marketing. They only think about writing the smartest,cleanest,coolest software ever written. And many such projects yield some the best software ever written – the Linux kernel, The Apache web server,the Firefox browser.
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ERP software is different from regular software in many ways. One of the most significant differences is the effort required to take an installed system and make it usable for end users. If you install a spreadsheet software, for example, all you need to do to start using it is just launch the application. On the contrary,it might take a year or more from the moment an ERP systems is installed until users can start using it. Open source ERP software made a huge step in simplifying the installation processes, and its now almost as easy to install open source ERP as it is to install your favorite Office suite (we recommend Openoffice).

The next series of posts will demonstrate how easy it is to set up a vanilla (software system that was just installed and did not undergo any changes,configuration or customization) open source ERP installation to a point where users can start using the system.

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One of the most valuable pieces of information Open Source ERP Guru is offering is open source ERP projects activity trends. It is updated daily, currently from Sourceforge.com ERP category page, reading RSS feeds and calculating the number of daily downloads and forum posts. We will soon add more statistics from other sources. Please leave comments and let us know what other measurable metrics are interesting to you and what can be improved with the current metrics.

I would also like to let you know about a great blog related to open source ERP – Tikitak. It’s in Spanish, unfortunately I cannot read it, but from the comments Tikitak is posting here, I know he has a lot of smart things to say. If you can read Spanish and are into open source ERP and related stuff, I would definitely visit his blog.

Compiere is the most popular open source ERP software to date – largest number of downloads, channel partners,consultants and live customers. The first ever ERP software I installed was Compiere, back in 2002. It was quite remarkable back then – for me,ERP software was this huge,complicated software that requires 10 days to install,not mentioning the money you would have to pay for licenses. I desperately looked for a 30-days trial of commercial ERP solutions but soon realized I would have to be the CIO of a 1B$+ company to get any attention from those guys.

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One of the most important evaluation criteria for open source ERP is project activity. The Sourceforge graveyard is full of open source projects skeletons. When you measure a projects activity, the most important thing to measure is trends, or the rate of change in the parameters you measure.

In the last few days, I have been collecting data from the Sourceforge statistics RSS. The following graph displayes the number of downloads per day for the most popular open source ERP projects (this is still Beta so numbers might vary):

Please remember that the statistics were not checked thoroughly so actual numbera might vary!.

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Any news you hear about an open source projects acquisition by one of the large IT vendors brings mixed feelings. The first things you think about is the practical meanings of such a move. MySQL is such an important component of the Internet (it is storing the very words you are now reading..), that the slightest changes in the way MySQL is distributed (currently it’s a completely free,open source project) might cause a real disruption to the growth of information on the Internet.

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Neogia is one of several open source ERP solution built on top of Apache Open For Business framework (Ofbiz). The Apache open source project provides a set of services required to operate a business – create customer records,products and sales orders, for example. The Apache project does not provide a complete solution but rather the building blocks for a real ERP application. I feel that applications built on top of OFbiz have a good chance to be successful. Apache open source projects provide commercial-grade, robust solutions that power the almost infinite growth of the Internet. Applications such as the Apache web server, Tomcat and Lucene are all top-notch applications, offering quality,ease of use and ROI that few commercial products can compete with. I hope that OFBiz will evolve to become as important to the business community as other Apache projects are to the Internet. 

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