Open Source ERP Guru

Openbravo and Compiere, arguably the most popular open source ERP solutions, are both expanding their activities globally.

• Compiere announced a new partnership in Spain with local software company,Directive Soft. I believe that beyond the importance of the Spanish open source ERP market, Compiere is trying to make a point by establishing partnership in the country where Openbravo is created. In any competitive situation, making grounds in your competitors own country is always important and often given special attention. It’s like you are saying “I am so much better than my competition that even in his own country he is loosing customer to me”.
• Openbravo, after announcing a business oriented tour in Latin America,are now holding two technical workshops-one in Miami,Florida and the other one in Barcelona, their hometown. Best of all, at least according to the press release, participation is free of charge! That’s a great way to expand and build trust with the community around your open source project. It also increases the level of knowledge around the product which is crucial to the success of production implementation of any ERP software.
• Openbravo will participate in this year’s Open Source Business Conference. The conference looks really promising with participant such as HP, Microsoft, RedHat, Novell, SugarCRM, Pentaho and XTuple, the company behind OpenBooks open source ERPopen source ERP. This year’s conference will focus on ‘Putting Open Source To Work’. I’d love to be there, maybe next year..

I would like to challenge the open source ERP community today.

A few days ago I got a great email from one of my readers. I really liked what I read as the email covers very well many of the questions and concerns that are raised today by anyone who is looking into open source ERP – either for his own business or for his customers. I will post the email as-is. The mail raises some issues in regards to support but also asks ‘which open source ERP solution best answers these requirements’.

The challenge is to provide the reader with enough information about the projects that will demonstrate the feasibility of open source ERP solutions for small-medium business with the business requirements listed below.

Start Quote:

From my experience the #1 problem with ERP/CRM opensource solutions in general
is the lack of/bad communication via email, their bad/slow forums and poorly
implemented websites. (OpenBravo seems the best so far for communications) If they “shouted out” a little bit about supporting key business features they would have customers lined up around the block. More examples and StepbyStep Tutorials to help the “average” user. Sorry for the rant.

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Software projects are on a constant cycle of development, testing, releasing and fixing. open source ERP projects are not different.

I would like to update on the latest released version of the different solutions and elaborate a little about the projects’ development roadmaps.

Openbravo

Openbravo latest release is R2.35 maintenance pack 1 which was released back in early January 2008. It contains mainly bug fixes, focusing on improving stability – no new functionality was added. Openbravo have been lately releasing an impressive amount of localizations for countries such as south Africa, Romania, Venezuela, Malaysia, Singapore, The Netherlands, Argentina, Poland and France. Localization for ERP software is so important because without it, it’s almost impossible to use the software due to language differences and local accounting regulations.

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What Is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) software is a set of technologies and best practices providing insight into business activities.

The need for business intelligence is an integral part of any operational information system (e.g. ERP). Initially, reports were used to retrieve such information, but as users became more demanding and sophisticated , and the amount of enterprise data requiring analysis grew exponentially, software companies started developing stand-alone BI tools, separate from their transactional systems-ERP.

These BI tools initially included a database designed specifically to allow multi-dimensional analysis of large amounts of data (data warehouse) and tools to query and mine that warehouse. An example for such a query might be comparing year-over-year sales in a region of a specific line of products.

BI tools evolved further,improving data extraction processes from the source ERP systems,enhancing performance and user experience through graphical and web-based querying tools.

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Starting today,I will be reporting on open source ERP news, in addition to the regular posts – recorded flash tutorials, user guides,installation walkthrough and industry trends.

I am not affiliated with any of the open source ERP vendors so news reported are provided with my own interpretation, trying to add my take to the standard press releases published by the vendors.

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