Open Source ERP Guru

Communication – you can never emphasize enough how crucial open communication is to the success of any commercial enterprise. Business information systems are designed to facilitate a constant flow of information through the arteries of your company. Another every important aspect to your enterprise’s communication is business related conversations.

These ‘conversations’ take many forms – verbal conversations, over the phone or in person, but also ‘electronic’ conversations, mainly through Emails. Whenever a business event occurs, a conversation is (or should be) triggered.  Let’s take our ATP events, for example – a user notices that stock levels for product A are about to go below safety stock levels. He will send an email to the person in the organization in charge of inventory replenishment. That person will than create a purchase order or production order, and reply back the conversation trigger.

These conversations are attached to any object in an ERP system – to a customer, a supplier, a delayed sales order or a purchasing order that’s long overdue.

The problem with using emails for conversations in a business environment is twofold – emails lack the immediate business context of the underlying  business event, and are ‘private’ – only those who are on the email loop are aware of the undergoing conversation around the business event.

The demo below will demonstrate a conversation module which is embedded into the relevant business object, in our case – a product. A conversation is initiate once a user identified an issue with inventory management, using the ATP viewer. The conversation module will be part of many of the application (in addition to the ATP viewer ) we will release. The way we implemented conversations, other than being in the immediate context of the business event, have the advantage of being accessible by anyone. This level of transparency is extremely powerful in solving issues quickly while keeping an audit trail for future reference.

Business Conversations – click image to view demo

We would like to remind you to register to your RSS feed – it is a very useful way to communicate with us efficiently.

Flex is an RIA (Rich Internet Application) development environment that provides several useful business capabilities – consuming XML files and web services and displaying data grids and charts. I have been working with Flex to provide a business dashboard application that will allow Openbravo business users to gain insight into their operational data in a simple, intuitive way.

The demo below (click the image to play flash demo) shows an early version of the dashboard. The data in the dashboard is read from XML files, which were created using Pentaho’s ETL tool (Kettle). I made the dashboard as generic as possible so that it would be straight-forward to use it with other open source ERP applications.

I plan to further develop the dashboard to cover business areas such as finance, manufacturing, procurement and inventory management. If you have any suggestions regarding the dashboard feel free to contact us.

Openbravo Flex Analytical DashBoard – recorded flash demo

(click image to play demo)

If you would like to stay updated on the development of the dashboard, we recommend you to register to our RSS feed.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post I presented the first of a series of demos that will become a flash dashboard application that can be used for business analysis of open source ERP systems.

I am currently using Openbravo as the ERP system to analyze, but since Pentaho’s Kattle ETL tool is used to extract data from Openbravo, adapting my ETL jobs to other open source ERP systems should not be too hard. At the end of the day, the flash dashboard will be able to support 3-4 open source ERP systems.

Flex For The Business User 

For the development of the dashboard, I use Flex 3. Flex is Adobe’s flash compiler. It has 3 features which I find very powerful in the context of business software:

• Flex OLAP – as I mentioned in my last post, Flex 3 provides ‘OLAP on the fly’ , enabling multidimensional analysis of data (for example, sales data). Using flex makes it much easier to run simple OLAP queries without the complexity of using an OLAP server. The problem is performance – try to OLAP more than 50K records with your browser, either your browser will choke or your users will choke you…
• Charts – flex enables you to generate very good looking flash charts with little effort. The recorded demo in this post will demonstrate this.
• Flex Web-Service Client – in my opinion, Flex’s most powerful feature is its SOAP web service client. Building business mashups with Flex is straight forward. You are only limited by your imagination, as Flex provides you with very strong web-service consumption tools as well as UI elements to hook your data to.

In this posts’ recorded demo, you will see 2 of the 3 features in action. The flash dashboard contains the OLAP analysis components along with some basic charts. What is badly missing in the dashboard is choice – currently, users cannot decide which data they want to chart, for example. I will continue adding more features to the open source ERP Dashboard – if you find it useful or have ideas on how to further develop it, let us know.

open source ERP Dashboard Charts Using Flex

Read the rest of this entry »

In the last few weeks I have been working on integrating BI functionality with open source ERP. I have mostly worked with Pentaho, an open source BI suite.

What Is OLAP?

One of the major components of every BI solution is OLAP. OLAP lets you run multidimensional analysis on your operational data. The idea behind OLAP is to enable very fast multidimensional queries. These queries will answer questions such as what was my revenue in the past 12 months,grouped by region and by product group, for example. This type of queries are very intensive and resource consuming for standard operational information systems (such as E.R.P.) and can bring it to a complete halt (no shipments, no invoicing, no order entry…).

Flex, The Flash Compiler, and OLAP

I was surprised to see that Adobe Flex has OLAP functionality embedded in Flex 3. I used Flex as graphical web-services consuming client (upcoming posts will show you Flex’s strength as a SOAP client) and thought I’d give their OLAP a chance.

Flex is a very elegant and powerful flash compiler,which provides client side OLAP – that means that the actual parsing of the OLAP query,data aggregation and OLAP cube display is handled by the browser running the flash application compiled by Flex. This limits the number of rows of data you can OLAP to about 50K records. However, you can do some of the aggregation  pre-processing and let Flex worry about the actual rendering of the data on the screen. Another possibility is to connect Flex to an OLAP server and let the OLAP sever do all the hard work. I’ll try to connect Flex to Pentaho’s OLAP server (Mondrian) and I’ll let you know how it went. I think it can be a great combo.

The recorded demo (which can be found inside the post, click on “Read Complete Article »»” below) shows a flash application with two OLAP views-sales by region over a period of 8 months and sales by product line over the same period. The dataset used as the source for these views was extracted from Openbravo’s database (they provide a set of sample data) using Kattle, Pentaho’s ETL tool. Since my ETL job is completely flexible, I can run the exact same multidimensional analysis on data coming from other open source ERP systems, such as Compiere,Apache OFBiz,Postbooks or Adempiere.

OLAP Sales Data Cube Flash Application Built Using Flex 3

Read the rest of this entry »

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" /]

If you go to Sourceforge.net, a website that provides an open source project development platform,and browse to the ERP category, you will find no less than 402 results! That’s quite an amazing number, but if you try to dig in a little bit around that category,you will notice that many projects are actually only CRM (Customer Relationship Management),SCM (Supply Chain Management), accounting or HR applications. They do not fully support the functionality required from a real ERP solutions.

So how would you define an ERP system? My post An Introduction to ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning is a good starting point. If you are interested in implementing ERP in your organization, or are a consultant who is looking into open source ERP solutions,you must make sure the solutions you are considering does support all required businesses processes.

Read the rest of this entry »