Openbravo Manufacturing
We continue our series of reviews of ERP manufacturing modules by the leading open source ERP vendors. Last time we covered Compiere’s manufacturing module, and this time we’ll review Opnebravo’s manufacturing, called Production Management.
Openbravo, similar to Compiere, provides a comprehensive manufacturing solution for discrete industries. All the usual suspects are supported – configuration of work centers, operations, machines, cost centers are all done in the manufacturing module.
In the product level, you will define your B.O.M and relevant costing. Openbravo provides a details costing mechanism, where you can load cost of just about every operation and resource used in your production run. It’s important to note that costing is a real challenge every manufacturer faces – not only in terms of functionality required from the software solution used, but also in terms of how to load different expanses to accurately reflect production costs and later calculate actual sales margins. Openbravo does a good job of providing a flexible costing framework.
Openbravo also support make to order WO, manual creation of WO and a basic MRP (we will compare MRP solutions in a different series of posts).
In terms of functionality, Openbravo provides similar levels of functionality to what is offered by Compiere. I liked the Compiere user interface better - in compiere, it’s much easier to find out what the status of each work order is, see the different operations forming the routing of the order and in general, to find your way around the relevant screens. Working on several ERP manufacturing solutions in the past, I felt more at home with Compiere’s manufacturing module UI.
However, Openbravo production management has two very important advantages over Compiere manufacturing: it’s a true open source module, with very detailed, public documentation, and more importantly, it’s completly free! Well, it’s not really free, as any real world ERP implementation is never free(support and customization costs, to remind you). But Openbravo doesn’t make you pay separately for their manufacturing module, as does Compiere. Care to try Openbravo’s production management module? you can just download and install Openbravo ERP and production management is there, no extra costs, no special licenses.
Summary
Pros: Fully functional manufacturing module suitable for discrete manufacturing, free, great documentation.
Cons: Cumbersome UI.
Demo: Openbravo online demo system
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Just a small note: “Openbravo” is misspelled as “Opnebravo” in the first paragraph.
Great site, btw.
How would you compare manufacturing of OpenBravo to OpenERP?
@Ehab You can find the comparisons of OpenBravo and OpenERP at http://www.evaluationmatrix.com/comparison
Well, it’s NOT free anymore. If you check out the version 3.0 roadmap, you’ll find that they are pulling the entire Manufacturing, MRP, and Project Management modules out of the community edition and making them into extensions that require the Profe$$ional Edition.
Now you’re back to having to invest not just time, but money to see if it will work for your company like everything else.
More details on that last note:
Here’s a link to OpenBravo’s Chief Technology Officer’s blog post about the feature reduction: http://paolojuvara.blogspot.com/2010/09/easier-erp-deployment-why-simplified.html
He says it’s to simplify the software to make it easier to adopt, but in the very roadmap document he references in the post – it also says:
Premium features: features included in the core footprint but disabled in the Community Edition. The purpose of these features is to raise awareness among users of the existence and benefits of the Professional Edition and to provide incentives for its adoption.
That sounds a bit different than just making it easier to setup, which I’m sure it accomplishes.
Hi, Thanks for this review.
I was looking for an Open source ERP suitable for small manufacturing. I installed Openbravo community edition v3.0 RC3 to evaluate it and realised that the MRP, Manufacturing and Project management modules are no longer available on community edition.
Small business (like me) use opensource because they can’t afford the capital investment without knowing the business benefits. so I believe small manufacture business can’t evaluate Openbravo’s functionality (as they are less likely go for the professional edition to start with).
I don’t want to investment on a product if it’s not suitable for my business.
In my case, I would like to go for an opensource product to save my capital investment and if I find the product suitable for my business then, I will upgrade it to professional edition, mainly for support/upgrade.
Hope this helps.
Deepak