Open Source ERP Guru

ERP localization is an important indicator of the maturity of any business application, and of ERP applications specifically.Most efforts going into ERP developments focus on supporting generic functionality, required by as many potential customers as possible. The reality is that if you plan to offer your ERP solution globally, functionality alone is not enough. Support for localization is a necessary (yet not sufficient) condition to widespread adoption of an ERP system.

I got a chance to talk with Richard Morley, open source ERP vendor  Openbravo accounting and localization manager. We had an interesting conversation and I learned quite a lot on the subject. Richard has been working in ERP development and consulting for about 11 years. He joined Openbravo late last year.

What is localization

Defining the term localization is not as simple as it might seem. In general, any aspect of an ERP application, whether functionality, data or user interface, that has a different meaning and different usage patterns in diffident countries, is a candidate to be part of a localization. Richard uses a broad definition: “..it is a multitude of factors, it’s not just functionality, it also has  to do with language, culture, support, the many factors that  drive to claim to have an effective localization. We drive to provide assurance to Openbravo users that this is what they are getting”.

Localization in Openbravo

Openbravo localization is a decentralized project according to Richard, where each local community develops their own localizations, as oppose to most proprietary ERP vendors, where localization is a centralized projects, developed by the vendor itself. Openbravo “focuses on language support and the functional core of Openbravo ,and the capability of the core to go to any particular country”. Richard emphasizes a key guideline in Openrbavo’s localization efforts: Openbravo itself should provide the underlying functionality and tools to make the adjustments required for any particular locale as simple as possible: “view Openbravo as a platform, we believe it is viable in most countries with varying degree of intervention.. we try to simplify the process of fine tuning the application for any particular market of even vertical”.

Openbravo localization covers  :”.. the ability to capture the transactional data with sufficient granularity for reporting needs, number handling, rounding rules, tax logic and tax rule including tax on tax and withholding tax, currency management, chart of accounts, and multi cultural aspects – not only language, but also the ability of the UI to present data in away that is culturally excepted: display of number, address format, RTL , date etc.”

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Not only is cloud computing a hot trend these days, it also makes a lot of sense in the context of the open source ERP industry. Cloud, or Software as a Service(SaaS) offerings, appeal mostly to the huge SMB market. Compiere, one of the leading open source ERP vendors, announced it will offer a version of its ERP software to be deployed in the Amazon EC2 cloud.
Compiere’s EC2 offering tries to bring the good from both worlds – traditional on-premise ERP systems and modern SaaS offerings. Most current SaaS platforms run multiple customer instances on the same server. Compiere cloud edition, based on Compiere professional edition, lets customers run their ERP instance on their own virtual, yet private, server.

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Barcelona is an amazing city, some would argue the most attractive tourist destination in the world. You don’t need many excuses to go their – great weather, best football(soccer?) team in the world, and the Dali museum is a short ride away.
Openbravo, one of the leading open source ERP vendors, is holding the 3 days Openbravo World Conference 2009, April 17th, in Barcelona. I was glad to find out that the main theme of the conference is the open source community around the Openbravo project.
The sponsors list is impressive. I was surprised to find Oracle as a gold sponsor. I didn’t know Oracle takes part in several open source initiatives, but I’m still wondering which oracle is sponsoring the event – the successful database maker (Openbravo runs on Oracle’s DB), or the ERP vendor vacuum cleaner. Either way, you must be doing something right when one of the worlds’ largest business software companies sponsors your event. Other sponsors include more obvious sponsors such as IBM, Sun, Talend (open source integration) , Canonical (Ubuntu Linux) and our friends at ERP.com, where I occasionally guest blog.
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I often get visitors to my blog searching for ‘hosted ERP systems’, ‘Openbravo hosting’ or ‘hosted Compiere’. One of the hottest current trends in IT is hosted, or SaaS( software as a service), business software. There are many advantages to using a hosted ERP system, especially for small-medium businesses. We cover the subject of on-demand (hosted) ERP systems in our free ERP training.

Hosting an ERP system is an idea that has been around for years. In the late 90’s, it was called ASP – Application Service Providers. These providers installed business software (CRM,ERP etc.) in their own hosting facility, and offered its customers access to the systems over the Internet, usually for a monthly subscription.

The problem back then was that the Internet infrastructure, in terms of speed, reliability and security, was not mature enough. A few years later, Salesforce.com, a CRM providers, was the first commercially successful business software vendor to deliver their application over the Internet. By that time, the trend was renamed to SaaS – software as a service, and is now part of the Cloud Computing trend.

CRM systems are much more simple than ERP systems, and are easier to offer off the cloud. Additionally, they require much less customization, and uptime requirements are leaner than those of ERP systems. These factors make hosting an ERP system a more challenging issue.
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This is the official free online ERP training agenda and schedules page. If you plan to attend our live ERP sessions,  make sure you visit this page to get the latest updates.

Course Name:

ERP 101

Next Sessions:

Thursday, March 19th, 2009, at 16:00 GMT
Sunday, March 8th, 2009, at 15:00 GMT (Completed)
March 3rd, 2009, at 17:00 GMT (Completed)

Next Session Item:

ERP Modules: Manufacturing, Inventory, Sales, Purchasing, Accounting. Includes live ERP demos.
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E-commerce solutions have been around for several years. Back in the early days of online shopping, during the late years of the last century, E-commerce solutions were stand alone applications, built using modern web technologies. Integration between these systems and ERP systems were cumbersome, unreliable and insecure.

As open source ERP solutions began to emerged in the early 2000’s, web based business software became one of the hottest trend. There were many good reasons for that trend, one of them was the more natural integration with E-commerce solutions, slowly becoming a crucial competitive necessity for any type of business.

All open source ERP solution offer some E-commerce functionality, either as a native module or through an integration with a dedicated, stand alone E-commerce solution. We will cover these solutions in a series of articles, starting with Apache Ofbiz. We will later cover solutions and integration points from Compiere, Openrbavo, xTuple and others.

The reason we chose to start with Apache Ofbiz that it has the best native E-commerce functionality we’ve seen in any ERP system. It almost seems like it’s an E-commerce solution with an ERP extension. Another OfBiz feature we like is the user experience, which is vital to a successful online shopping store. Although the interface is not the most beautiful (OfBiz plans to tackle this issue by introducing themes), interacting with the interface is very smooth and it is very easy to find what your looking for. I believe OfBiz can make an excellent solution if a better looking, more elegant theme is used.

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