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

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.

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.

Great site, btw.