Open Source ERP Guru

I’ve been covering open source ERP for the past six month. I can really feel that a lot is going on. That is a clear indication to where the industry is heading – a great alternative to commercial,proprietary solutions.

The industry news update will cover OpenERP’s community days,coming up this weekend, Compiere’s release of a Community Wiki site and Openbravo’s hunt for the brains of Europe.

Openbravo

Openbravo recently raised 12M$ in funding. During my ‘Meet The CEO’ interview with Manel Sarasa,Openbravo’s CEO (to be published soon), he stated that Openbravo will continue to invest heavily into the development of the product. Their current recruiting round is a step in that direction and a great move on their part, if you ask me.

They are going after European students in their final year. The students will get 3 weeks of training, followed by an opportunity to join Openbravo as employees, depending on the successful completion of the course.

So if you are a bright student, studying in one of Europe’s top-tier universities and looking for a job in open source ERP, Openbravo is a great place for you.

OpenERP

26th-27th of June (Tomorrow and the day after) are OpenERP’s (former Tiny) Community Days. The purpose of the community day is to work together toward ‘Preparing the next stable version of OpenERP’.

The gathering participants (with an emphasis on participants as oppose to audience) are ERP professionals,users of the software,partners and developers. They are going to discuss short and long term strategy, review working processes and have several workshops. I know that TinERP has an enthusiastic, proud community that will make this days a success.

This kind of community days is one of the things that differentiate open source ERP projects from commercial ones – everyone can have a say on where the product is going. You don’t have to be a customer that pays a gazillion $$$ to the vendor in order to be heard, development is not detached from customers (which include free-downloading users).

I hope the community days will be successful. If you attend the OpenERP community day, I’d love to hear what’s going on.

Compiere

Compiere released a Community Wiki, which provieds tons of valuable, well-organized documentation related to the Compiere’s open source ERP offering.

I hope Compiere (as well as other open source ERP projects) will continue to develop the Wiki and provide more free documentation. The successful adoption of open source ERP solutions is a function of the amount of knowledge that exists in the community. The greater the knowledge, the more success stories.

If you are serious about integration, you need to talk SOA. SOA stand for Service Oriented Architecture. I’m sure 99% of my visitors have heard that buzzword.  A good explanation about what SOA and what are its benefits is can be found here.

The foundations of SOA are web services, and although SOA is all about standards (e.g. standard method of exposing business functions through web-services), which business functions are exposed is not standard at all. It is left to the software vendor to decide what he wants to expose.

Openbravo Web-Services

Since my last few posts are about integration, I decided to explore Openbravo’s  web-srvices. According to the web-service guide in Openbravo’s Wiki, you just need to run:

#ant installWebServic

That did not work initially. I found that you have to update the correct URL of your Openbrabo installation for the deployment of the web services to work. In my installation, Tomcat is listening on a port other than the regular one and I do not use ‘localhost’ as the server name.  If this is the case for you, you have to change the file:

build.xml  -  which is located under the root directory of your Openbravo installation.

The property that needs to be changed is:

<property name=”context.url” value=”http://localhost:8880/openbravo”/>

You should change ‘localhost’ to the hostname you are using for your tomcat installation, and the port 8880 to the port your tomcat is listening on (usually 8080, but really depends on your configuration).

Now run

#ant installWebService

Your Openbravo is now SOA ready! , or almost. I hope that Openbravo will expose many more business functions through web services. This is on the roadmap of every major business software vendor and I believe this is where Openbravo should go. Also, Openbravo uses Axis 1.4 as a web service generator, while the current development project is Axis2, which has better performance,lower memory footprint and a host of other features that make it a better choice than Axis 1.4.

Openbravo WSDL File

The next few posts are going to show several possible methods of integration between Openbravo E.R.P. , Sugar C.R.M. and Pentaho BI. I think this type of integration might be very interesting for anyone looking for a complete business solution. C.R.M. is becoming increasingly popular, especially among SMB’s, as well as BI. I have chosen Openbravo as the ‘backend’ E.R.P. system, but whatever is demonstrated here can be implemented using other open source (or proprietary) E.R.P.’s as well.

This post will demonstrate a simple ETL process where new Openbravo customers records are transferred, through Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle), to SugarCRM and created as accounts. Obviously, in a real-life scenario this would not be a manual job as demonstrated here.

The recorded demo will be added, just like all other recorded demos, to our Flash Comparator page.

Data Transfer From E.R.P. To C.R.M.

There are several ways to go about this, and it really depends on your business scenario. You might want to decide that the moment a new customer record is created in Openbravo, the record is transferred to Sugar. To do that, you would have to customize Openbravo so that when the save button in Openbravo is clicked, the Pentaho Data Integration job is triggered, a file is created, followed by a trigger to an automatic upload of this file into SugarCRM. That is possible but not so simple and relatively error prone.

The second way would be to use web-services, or implement SOA (service oriented architecture). Assuming your C.R.M. (I still need to check that for Sugar) supports a ‘create customer’ web-service, a call would have to made where all the fields in the source customer record are mapped to the web-service input fields. To do that, you would need a web service client that is able to read the data from Openbravo,map it to the web-service input parameters and then call the SugarCRM web service. One of my next posts will present this option in details.

As for the process I have actually implemented – it is for demo purposes only. I have created a job that reads 3 Openbravo tables, containing some of the customer information I need to pass to Sugar (customer name,address information etc.). I have decided to join the 3 tables using an SQL query as this is  best practice provided  by Pentaho. A file is created by the job from the Openbravo data and then imported manually into Sugar.

The job I created would be better off used in a batch process, transferring a large amount of customers and triggered by a scheduler. So you could set up a scheduler to start this Pentaho Data Integration job every night and transfer all the customer records that where create in the past 24 hours.

Openbravo Customer to SugarCRM Account – Recorded flash demo

(Right-Click ‘Zoom In’ on the flash movie for better quality)
[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/openbravo2sugar.swf" height="480" width="700" /]

Our first Meet The CEO podcast featured Ned Lilly, the CEO of open source ERP vendor XTuple. XTuple works in a hybrid model, offering a free,open source product (Postbooks) as well as a commercial version (OpenMFG). XTuple also added a third offering, Standard edition.

XTuple is an example of the ‘reverse’ open source business model-it used to sell only a commercial version of its ERP product(OpenMFG), but then decided to release a free,open source, yet somewhat limited version in Postbooks, which focuses on accounting, purchasing,CRM and inventory management but lacks the depth of the manufacturing functionality OpenMFG is well-know for.

The company has never raised money and built a solid business around its OpenMFG’s  strong manufacturing capabilities. They have close to 100 customers, which was a pleasant surprise. Most of the customers are in the U.S where the company is located and most of its partners are.

Listen to Meet The CEO – Xtuple’s Ned Lilly Podcast

Meet The CEO – XTuple’s Ned Lilly



Lately I’ve been looking into integration between open source BI solution, Pentaho, and Openbravo ERP. After installing and setting up the different components, I decided I would start with a very simple task-a basic ETL process, just to get a feeling for Pentaho.

To make things a bit more interesting, I decided I’d throw SugarCRM into the mix. SugarCRM is the world’s leading open source CRM solution. It is written in php and runs on an Apache web server using Mysql as the database engine. My ETL job will transfer some customer information from Openbravo to SugarCRM – that would be a scenario for anyone who is using Openbravo and would like to start working on Sugar as a CRM solution.

After installing the Pentaho BI suite, I decided to take a look at their ETL offering,Kettel. It’s a java based tool, but since the design-time of ETL is a client-side activity,I decided to run it on off my Windows XP PC. ETL tools are part of every major BI offering  because they are used to upload large amount of data from operational systems (e.g. ERP) to data warehouses.

ETL tools are also used in migration processes-if you replace your ERP vendor, upgrade to a new version or transfer data from ERP to CRM, for example,you will need an ETL tool. Although ETL tools allows you to upload as many or as few records as you like, the true strength of this tools lie in their ability to perform well when transferring very large amounts of data,sometimes tens of millions of records. In our simple test we will transfer a small number of customer records.

Openbravo->SugarCRM, Customer->Account ETL process using Pentaho Kettel

Notice in the screen capture the source (Openbravo business partner table), the fields mapping step in the middle and the destination – a CSV file to be imported into SugarCRM.

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We are very happy to announce that Open Source ERP Guru will hold a series of interviews with the CEOs of the leading Open Source ERP vendors. We will discuss business,technology and community and how to make them work together. The interviews will be recorded and posted on Open Source ERP Guru along with a summery and the most interesting answers we get. I am sure the Open Source ERP industry leaders will provide us with valuable insight into the current state and future trends of open source business software.

If you have any questions you always wanted to ask the CEO of your favorite Open Source ERP solution, let me know – if it’s interesting enough, I’ll pass your question to the CEO.

Yesterday I provided several useful links to recorded demos from several open source ERP vendors. Today I will complement this list with links to live demo systems which are available over the internet for immediate,free access – sandboxes provided by the ERP vendors or their partners.

That is one of the greatest things about open source software in general and open source ERP in particular-everything is open, there is no reason to hide your software behind walls of fire. When was the last time a commercial ERP provided you with a sandbox to play around with for free?

Openbravo Publicly Available Demo System

If you are aware of any other publicly available sandbox system, please let me know.

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Compiere is offering demo videos for its reporting tool. This free offering will expire June 15th. I thought I would take this chance to provide you with some very useful links to recorded videos (some would call it E-Learning) offered by the different open source ERP vendors.

The first place I would encourage you to go is to our very own Flash Comparator. If you ever wondered what it is (there is a link in the top nav-bar), the Flash Comparator is a collection of recorded flash clips of different processes common to all ERP solutions, such as creating products, customers and sales orders. The idea behind it is to provide a very sample,immediate way to compare the different open source ERP solutions, all from a single page, and all for free, of course. There are currently recorded demos from Compiere,Openbravo and Apache OFBiz.

The collection is constantly growing so you are welcomed to register to our RSS feed to learn about new addition to the Flash Theater.

Create Product In Compiere – From Our Flash Theater

(Right-Click the flash clip and select Zoom-In to improve viewing quality)

[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/CompiereCreateProduct.swf" height="550" width="750" /]

The different project are also offering their own recorded materials-some for free and some not. In terms of free recorded demos, XTuple is a winner by knockout – they provide a huge amount of recorded material, all for free. It can be found here.

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Pentaho is a leading Open Source BI suite. It contains all components required from an enterprise-grade BI solution-reporting,dashboards,analytics engine,ETL and data mining. The reason I am covering Pentaho here is that I believe an open source BI can complement the open source ERP solutions I cover here.

The Pentaho offering is a classical, ‘modern’ open source model – you can download,install and use a ‘basic’ edition of the software for free, but Pentaho charges for additional ‘enterprise class’ functionality, support and some advance administration options.

The installation itself (I am installing Pentaho 1.7 GA) was not as straight forward as I expected and required some manual work. Because of that, I will write a complete installation guide, hoping it will save some time and effort to others who plan to install Pentaho. I will run the Pentaho server on my Linux Ubuntu Box.

Pentaho is written in Java, running on Jboss application server. That makes integrating it with Openbravo or Compiere somewhat easier, both written in Java as well. However, BI solutions are platform agnostic – they only rely on the underlinying data layer and are independent of the programming language used to write the ERP system.

Pentaho is a BI solution and it requires a database that will contain the data to be analyzed or mined. For that purpose, I will use a Mysql database, provided by Pentaho, with some sample data.

BTW – Pentaho delivers several out of the box default users and passwords. They can be found under the ‘Valid Users’ drop down menu on the upper-right corner of your Pentaho installation homepage.

Sample Pentaho Report

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A couple of days ago I wrote about my intentions to work on integrating Pentaho, an open source BI solution and Openbravo, one of the leading open source ERP products. Implementing a BI solution on top of your ERP system can provide a lot of added value for your ERP project.

After I wrote about my Pentaho-Openbravo integration plans,I got some positive feedback about the idea, as it seems a natural fit for existing Openbravo customers.

I also got an interesting comment from the Openbravo community director. I understand that Openbravo already got a request from some of its customers to add BI functionality to the Openbravo Suite, and are working on providing the integration themselves. From reading their functional specification document, it seems like they are still considering which open source BI to integrate with. I believe the decision will be to integrate Pentaho.

Obviously, this is great news. I have no plans of developing anything in parallel to Openbravo. I will try to get more details about the scope and timeline of the Openbravo-Pentaho connector. I am going to continue to work on my own connectivity,hoping I can contribute with my knowledge to Openbravo’s ‘official’ efforts, but my connector will not be released to the community as I thought I might do.

Commercial BI-ERP Connectivity Ownership

An interesting thing to note is that in commercial enterprise software, the BI vendor is always in charge of the connectivity to the ERP (or any other backend) system. The BI vendor writes an ETL connectors or adapters that can consume data from major ERP systems. No additional efforts are required on behalf of the ERP vendor. In our case, it seems like the ERP vendor (e.g. Openbravo) is going to be in charge of developing the integration-writing code, publishing documentation and supporting the solution. I think it must be a cooperation between the two project, and the ownership of the connector should be on the BI side (Pentaho). We’ll have to see how it goes.

Funny Pentaho Clip

Pentaho Installation

The next post will be an open source BI Pentaho installation walkthrough on an Ubunu 8.04 Linux Machine. Stay tuned.