Open Source ERP Guru

Compiere, one of the leading open source ERP vendors, announced the release of a connector to the most popular on-demand CRM solution, Salesforce. The connector will provide bi-directional synchronization of data between Compiere ERP accounts, sales orders and invoices and Salesforce CRM lead tracking and other account information.

It’s always a dilemma for any ERP vendor as to how far he goes in developing his own CRM functionality. Modern CRM systems have evolved to cover almost all aspects of customer interaction (lead generation, contracts, quotations, service and support etc.), and ERP providers find it harder than ever to develop and sell their offering as “ERP & CRM” solution (Compiere’s website is titled: “Compiere Open Source ERP and CRM Business Solution”..)

The solution for most vendors is to provide a tight, out-of-the-box integration with a leading CRM provider. Compiere chose to integrate with Salesforce, but other options might have been the leading open source CRM solution, SugarCRM, or the most popular CRM application, Sieble (was acquired by Oracle a few years ago).

Compiere is not only offering its own customers a good CRM option in Salesforce, but also pitches its ERP solution as a backoffice solution to the huge Salesforce customer base.

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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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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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ERP, The Beginning

It all began with 5 IBM engineers from Manheim, Germany , working nights and weekends on the next big thing in software: ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning. The year was 1972, and the business software world was a spaghetti of systems, vendors and technologies. Departments could not communicate with each other because their software systems spoke different languages. Babel tower of custom applications. SAP was about to change everything.
They called the company Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung (“System Analysis and Program Development”) and incorporated in April of 1972. They had their first customer that year (probably the shortest sales cycle for SAP ever!!), ICI, which is still an SAP customer, 35 years later.
At that time ,MRP software was becoming widely regarded as a key to success in efficient manufacturing operations. Accounting software was around for more than a decade, dominated by solutions from IBM. Integrating the two was (and still is) a nightmare.
In 1973, SAP was ahead of everyone else in the integrated business applications industry, releasing R/1. In 1979 it will release the R/2 ERP application.

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Building software applications is unlike building anything else in the sense that you never stop building it (unless you run out of money..). Imagine building a two floors house, and while finishing the first one, you realize how useful it would be if you would build another floor, and then another.
ERP applications are very dynamic, much like the business environment nurturing it. For open source ERP vendors that means they will always need to build additional floors to make existing and future customers happier with their solution.
Our last development status report was almost a year ago, and it’s time to check on the different project’s development activities.

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Open Source ERP Guru, the leading open source ERP blog, is proud to announce the beginning of a series of free ERP training sessions. The first Introduction to ERP online course will be held next Monday, March 2nd 2009.

The ERP training classes will be held using online conferencing services from DimDim. Since we will be using the free conference service plan, we are limited to only 20 participant. If you are interested in participating in the first ERP training session, please contact us as soon as possible.

Courses are completely free, and donations are welcomed, using the Donate button bellow this post. Another way to show your gratitude is to link from your blog/website/social network profile to this post or to the homepage of Open Source ERP Guru.

The course is aimed at anyone who is interested in the exciting area of Enterprise Resource Planning. We will try to keep technical details to minimum, and focus on business processes, ERP modules and benefits for organizations. We will also demonstrate ERP functionality with open source ERP application Openbravo.

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The ultimate ERP sales pitch every customer gets to hear goes something like “our ERP system provides a complete solution to all your business requirements”. We all know that’s not true, but this is still the number 1 reason why companies invest in ERP solutions – they expect to get a single application to run their entire business.

It is practically impossible to develop a single application that will answer ALL the needs of all customers. What ERP vendors do, is develop an application that supports core business processes, aiming at the lowest common denominator in terms of business processes and data model. Even core business processes (order-to-cash, procure-to-pay) can vary widely from organization to organization (think manufacturer vs.  service company).

The solution? extension modules. ERP vendors were smart enough to realize they cannot provide everything every customer wants.Vertical solutions are a great example- hotels, airlines, communication companies, government agencies, all have very specific needs. So the vendors developed an extension framework, allowing 3rd party software developers to build their own modules.

These modules are independent of the core application, can have their own data structures, business logic and user interface. The framework is designed in a way that poorly developed modules will not interfere with core functionality. The framework should also provides means for the developer to make sure that the extension doesn’t break after an upgrade.

As far as proprietary ERP vendors are concerned, SAP provides the Business Add-In(BADI) interface, while Oracle provides both OA Framework (OAF) and Oracle Application Development Framework(ADF).
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Traditionally, one of the major challenges facing any implementations of ERP systems is the poor user experience. In other words, users hate ERP UIs. The reason is rather historical – since so much focus was placed initially into making ERP software robust and reliable, very little thought was dedicated to the end user. That created a generation of frustrated office,warehouse and shopfloor workers, making the lives of CIO rather miserable.

Attempts to solve this issue included web interfaces that were built on top of ERP systems, enterprise portal pages containing small ‘portlets’ or worklets or widgets, and custom made interfaces. Changing the core user interface was often too difficult, expansive and error-prone, and many ERP systems haven’t made any change to their core UI components in years.

The Openbravo team recognized this issue early, and took the best approach – listen to what your users are saying. They initiated a project called Openbravo’s User experience lab, where input from the community helps the user experience team redesign the user interface. I think one of the major differentiators between proprietary and open source ERP vendors is that due to cultural differences, open source vendors are much more transparent and are doing a much better job really listening to what their users have to say. This is another great example on how important listening to your customer is.
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One of the main goals of OS ERP Guru is to provide a comprehensive,professional comparison of open source ERP solutions,providing value to our readers looking into open source ERP solutions to run their business.
Due to the complexity of ERP projects,there are many factors which have to be considered before deciding on which ERP solution to implement.We have chosen the 10 most important evaluation criteria,which we will use in our open source ERP comparison benchmark matrix.

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