OFBiz – Creating New Customer
We continue the Apache OFBiz series with the creation of our first customer. Similar to other open source ERP solutions, OFBiz treats a customer as a sub-type of Party (other ERP software use the term Business Partner instead of Party), so creating a customer is very similar to creating a user,another type of Party, which we already did.
One thing that I am noticing about OFBiz is that it is strongly oriented towards B2C type of companies. As you can see from the flash recording attached to this post, the customer creation screen requires you to input a first and a last name. Obviously, nothing is stopping you from using these fields as placeholders for company name, but I see this as yet another sign of the strong B2C orientation of OFBiz.
Customer Related Information in OFBiz
The customer creation is pretty straight forward. The mandatory information is customer name and contact information (address, phone,email), but OFBiz provides an array of properties you can maintain about your customers – relationships with other parties,roles, tax information,rates and more.
OFBiz – Create Customer Flash Tutorial
[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/OFBizCreateCustomer.swf" height="550" width="885" /]
I wonder how much work it would be to build a real GUI upon that server, cause that is one ugly interface I’m afraid.
There seem to be a lot of functionality but it’s not nice to look at, as openbravo for example.
Hi Eren,
I agree that Openbravo’s UI is better looking than that of OFBiz. OFBiz is a strong ERP service platform – providing a functionality layer through services. That service framework is being used by other projects (Neogia, Opentaps) that can leverage the strength of the framework while improving the user experience.
OFBiz plans to improve its UI in the next releases – it was on their road map for Jan. and Feb. 2008. I will look into OFBiz’s next releases and share my experience with the new UI.
Yes, the very first impression could be that OFBiz has a B2C orientation
but it has the flexible concept of a Party which is be either a Person or a Group (= Company, Authority, internal department etc).
So to create a “B2B customer” just use “Create New Party Group” and add the customer role to this party.
Of course it would be better if there was “Create Customer (Person)” and a “Create Customer (Group)” entry on the “Create” screen of the PartyManager…
Hi Christian,
The ‘B2C feeling’ I got was not only from the Party creation process but also the ‘goodies’ the OFBiz team decided to implement (e.g. eBay and Google Base) might be seen as targeted towards people trading with other people online for a living (which is a huge market).
Obviously, OFBiz can be used by B2B types of businesses just as well.
Ok, then we agree on that OFBiz has strong B2C features