Open Source ERP Guru

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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Some time ago I got my hands on a copy of Openbravo Network Edition. Network edition is Openbravo’s answer to ‘What’s your business model’ question, facing any open source business application vendor. It provides everything a business needs to trust Openbravo with its business managements operations-professional support, IP Indemnification, Controlled updates and upgrades,Bug fixing guarantee and a new web based remote administration console. In this post, I will focus on the administration console.

The idea sounds promising – a central administration console, allowing you to monitor and manage your Openbravo instances. It provides the standard features of system services stopping and starting, simplified access to log files, scheduled reboots and more.

But the two most promising features of Openbravo Network are one-click backup, and more importantly, restore, as well as automatic updates. Having some experience as a systems’ administrator, I can’t really emphasize how important these two features are. Backups and upgrades are usually complicated and error prone processes.

Automatic Updates

Updating an ERP system to its latest release can be a nightmare. For larger ERP implementations, planning and testing an upgrade might take months. Upgrades are so critical because they can have huge negative business impact. If something goes wrong, you can have problems manufacturing, shipping goods  or properly invoicing your customer.

Openbravo Network offers an amazing feature – a single click upgrade. Sounds too good to be true. Not only that, but if things go wrong, you have a single click rollback!! .

I tried running the upgrade on my Openbravo instance, and it worked like charm. However, my system is just a test system. I believe that in real world, production environment, upgrading might become more challenging. In particular, the issue of customization needs to be addressed – when you upgrade, there is a good chance your customization might break. Carefully planning and testing is crucial, and Openbravo Network makes that as lot easier.

Backup and Restore

Another powerful Openbravo Network feature is a single-click backup and restore. You can restore your Openbravo instance to a windows shared directory or an NFS filesystem. Again, things are pretty straight forward-define your backup destination, click on backup, and vouala, you got yourself a backup. But more importantly, restore is as simple as backups, just press that Restore button, you don’t have to spend your weekend restoring your ERP system!.

Again, the backup and restore tests I ran worked flawlessly, but for production, customized systems, things have to be carefully tested.

The recorded demo shows how simple it is to backup and restore an Opnebravo instance using Openbravo Network. Just click on the image below, and our recorded demos page will appear. select ‘Openbravo Network Edition” from the Openbravo drop-down menu.

Openbravo Network Backup Procedure – Recorded Demo

Openbravo Network edition will undergo further evolution, there is no doubt. To stay up to date on all the latest news, consider registering to our RSS feed.

We covered Google’s new web browser, Chrome, a couple of days ago. We will now get a chance to see how Compiere’s web UI plays with Chrome.
The experience is similar to that of using Openbravo – the application renders fast and smooth. You will also notice in the recorded demo that Google added an ‘application mode’, making Compiere feel like a regular desktop application.
Since the future of all business software appears to be heading away from the desktop and toward the browser, we will conduct a benchmark of 3 browsers – Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Google Chrome, running open source ERP. To view the results and many other open source ERP related stories, we recommend you to register to our RSS feed.

The recorded demo can be found in our Flash Comparator, along with many other open source ERP recorded demos. you can find the Compiere-Chrome demo in the Compiere drop-down menu.

Compiere Web UI Running On Google Chrome

The net have been buzzing for the past 24 hours over Google’s surprising announcement of its new open source browser, Chrome. I haven’t seen any sources yet, but I’m sure they’ll release it soon.
Do we really need another browser? Google believes we do. After conquering the Internet, Google is after our desktop. The new browser would integrate seamlessly with the operating system, making web-based applications feel like regular application. Google sees a future where traditional desktop applications are made to be run on its browser, and the browser becomes the desktop. In other words, they want to kill Microsoft windows.
For the business user, that means he will no longer need to maintain various client software installed on his desktop. And most modern application, either running from the cloud of from within the enterprise, are already browser based.
Most open source ERP applications have a web UI (including Openbravo and Compiere) and are a natural fit into Google’s vision.

We decided to test drive Google chrome and see how well it copes with open source ERP applications. We have used Openbravo for this recorded demo, to be followed by another demo of Compiere’s web UI.
Google’s new browser is very light, fast and smooth. It renders pages with unusual ease and its footprint is minimal. It did have some issues rendering properly some of Openbravo’s screens.
One of the coolest things you can do in Chrome is take any tab (e.g. the Openbravo app tab), detach it from the browser and throw it around – the idea is that the Openbravo tab is no longer just a web page running under your browser, but a stand-alone application you can run from your desktop.

The Openbravo On Chrome recorded demo was added to our ever-expanding list of open source ERP recorded demos, which can be found in our Flash Comparartor page. To stay updated with the latest news on open source ERP, register to our RSS Feed.

Open Source ERP Openbravo Running On Google Chrome – Recorded Demo

A business lives by his customers’ orders. Probably the most frequently used report in any ERP system is the sales report. It is being run frequently by several different organizational functions – salespoeple, logistics, accounting and customer support.

Openbravo provides easy access to this report from its Sales Management menu. You can filter the results of the report by quite a few parameters – customer, product, product type, region, warehouse or product category.

The output of the report is in a nicely formatted HTML, although Openbravo offers several of its reports in PDF format.

To view the sales order recorded demo, open the Flash Comparator – it’s a collection of recorded demos of open source ERP applications. Select ‘Sales Order’ from the drop down menu under ‘Openbravo’.

Openbravo Sales Order Report – Recorded Demo

Click Image to open the recorded demos player

We continue the Apache OFBiz series with the creation of our first customer. Similar to other open source ERP solutions, OFBiz treats a customer as a sub-type of Party (other ERP software use the term Business Partner instead of Party), so creating a customer is very similar to creating a user,another type of Party, which we already did.

One thing that I am noticing about OFBiz is that it is strongly oriented towards B2C type of companies. As you can see from the flash recording attached to this post, the customer creation screen requires you to input a first and a last name. Obviously, nothing is stopping you from using these fields as placeholders for company name, but I see this as yet another sign of the strong B2C orientation of OFBiz.

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In our last posts, we have setup an initial Tenant in Compiere, followed by creating our first customer. This post will walk you through creating a product in Compiere. An overview of products in ERP systems can be found in the Openbravo product creation tutorial.

Please remember that for creating your first product, you can either use Compiere’s default user, GardenUser (part of Compiere’s default Client or Tenant, GardenWorld), or you can use the tenancy you created following the Compiere initial Tenant setup.

A recorded flash tutorial is attached to this post. The flash tutorial is also added to our newly released Flash Comparator, containing all flash tutorials which are part of tutorial posts, arranged side-by-side, allowing you to easily compare different open source ERP solutions. We currently have Compiere and Openbravo comparison. In a few days, Opentaps (the OFBiz based ERP solution) will be added to the Comparator.

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Customer will be the first master data object we will create in Compiere, followed by a product. Compiere, like many other ERP solutions, uses the Business Partner object as a superclass for the Customer object. That means that a Business Partner contains properties (like Name) that are common to several different other object types (Customer,Vendor,Employee), while each of these Business Partner “sub-types” contains additional specific properties. You can read the related Openbravo post to learn more about a Business Partner in open source ERP systems.

If you compare the create customer flash tutorial,you will immediately notice that Openbravo and Compiere are very similar in term of the underlying data model – they have almost identical objects structure. Since Compiere preceded Openbravo, it is reasonable to assume that Openbravo decided to adopt some of Compiere’s data structures to represent different objects (customer,product,vendor etc.). In fact, Openbravo explicitly declares it is using Compiere’s data dictionary.

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In our last few posts, we prepared our Openbravo system by creating a new Client system and created master data objects required for the creation of our first sales order – customer and product. Creating a sales order will complete the first sub-process of the Order-To-Cash core business process. As always, this guide is accompanied by a recorded flash tutorial.

Sales Order in ERP systems

The most basic transaction (and hopefully the highest volume transaction) in ERP systems is a sales order. Sales orders include two parts:

• Header – Sales order header usually contains information such as order type, customer name, open date, payment terms, customer address information and customers’ purchase order number.
• Lines – The sales order details include at least one line item. Each line item contains a product, order quantity and unit price. Additional line information might be discount rate,requested date and promised delivery date, among others.

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Customers and Products in open source ERP

The two building blocks of every commercial entity are products and customers.

In our last post we created a new customer in Openbravo – one of the leading open source ERP solutions. In this post we will talk about products in ERP systems and learn how to create a product in Openbravo. As always, a flash tutorial will show you exactly how it looks like inside Openbravo’s beautiful UI.

Once we have a customer and a product, we can create our first sales order. Next post will guide you through the process of creating a sales order in Openbravo. Then, we will move on to another leading open source ERP software – Compiere.

Just like we did with Openbravo, we will do an initial Compiere setup,create a customer and a product, followed by a sales order. We will follow this procedure through several other open source ERP solutions, creating flash tutorials for each solution. I believe it will provide valuable insight to those of you who are looking to compare different open source ERP solutions – you will be able to read and run the flash tutorial,side by side, of all the leading open source ERP solution,without leaving this site!

But our current discussion is around products in ERP software in general and in Openbravo in particular.

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