Open Source ERP Guru

In our last post we walked through the installation of Apache OFBiz. Once you got OFBiz installed and running, you should be able to access the OFBiz software by pointing your browser to http://server:8080/webtools (where ‘server’ is your server’s hostname) . We will use OFBiz’s default user – admin (password OFBiz) to login and start setting up the system.

Just like we did with other open source ERP software we setup – Openbravo and Compiere, we will create our company,a couple of users and import a chart of accounts file. Obviously, there are a lot more configuration steps you would take if you would go to production with OFBiz, but for our purposes these steps are sufficient.

Attached to this post you will find the first recorded flash tutorial of Apache OFBiz. We will also add OFBiz to the Flash Comparator, so if you did not visit the Comparator yet it’s time you do.

Prerequisite : Install OFBiz

Apache OFBiz Initial Setup Steps

To begin setting up OFBiz, you will need to login with the admin user. We will then follow the following steps:

1. Create Company – Several ERP systems use the term ‘Client’ to describe the company running that specific ERP systems. In OFBiz, its just called Company. That means that for each OFBiz installation, there is only one Company defined. That company can have different branches or departments, which are group members of that company.
2. Define Company properties – we will update some information about our company – mainly address information.
3. Create Users – We will need to create an administrative user and a regular user. OFBiz offers a very strong and flexible accesses control mechanism.
4. Import Chart of Accounts – we want to import a chart of accounts file, just like we did when we setup Openbravo and Compiere. OFBiz provides an XML accounts file which we will import using the XML import tool.

Once we complete this steps, we can start creating some product and customer information and get our first customer orders.

OFBiz Initial Setup Flash Demo

[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/OFBizInitialSetup.swf" height="550" width="900" /]