Open Source ERP Guru

A couple of weeks ago open source ERPvendor Openbravo announced the beta release of the 2.40 version of its ERP product. There were quite a few enhancement released as part of 2.40, most notably in the financial module.

I decided to test-drive 2.40 on my Ubuntu Linux machine (it’s a 3-years old AMD Sempron machine with 512MB of RAM).

The installation files are available for download from Sourceforge. I decided to use the Bitrock installer. One thing to remember when you install O – you need to setup your machines’ local environment first( Java, Tomcat, PostgreSQL). Make sure you follow the instructions here.

Once you have the environment setup, using the Bitrock installer is easy as installing any windows application (just Next,Next,Next, supplying some parameters of your Java and DBMS environment). The installer spent more of the time on building the Opnebravo database objects.

Openbravo 2.40 Requisition

Openbravo 2.40 includes many new enhancements, and this post will focus on one of them – Requisitions.

A word about the UI first – when I first logged in into Openbravo 2.40, I immediately noticed the improvements in the Ajax interface. Scrolling through long lists (of customers or products, for example) felt smoother than before. Openbravo is becoming increasingly more user friendly, but there are still room for improvements.

As for the requisition process – when a company needs to purchase goods, the process usually starts from a request created by one of the users to the purchasing department to buy something. The maintenance department, for example, might need to purchase a couple of spare parts for one of the machines on the shopfloor. The maintenance guy needs to open a purchasing request. The person in the purchasing department that was designated to handle this request might contact several suppliers, get several quotes , and upon deciding which supplier to purchase the spare parts from, will turn the requisite to a purchase order.

Requisition in Openbravo 2.40 – recorded flash demo (click link to view)

Openbravo Web Services

I was also able to finally get all Openbravo web services to work. In 2.30, I was only able to get the POS related web-services to run. Using 2.40, I now have access to all the available web-services, including the very useful getCustomer method. I hope Openbravo will work on expanding its web-services scope to provide access to other business objects (sales orders, production orders, purchasing order etc.).

I will demonstrate a business mash-up using the Openbravo web-services along with other open source business applications to demonstrate the possibilities of integration web services provide. Stay tuned to our blog by registering to our RSS feed.