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.

The Tryton project is an OpenERP (formerly tinyERP) fork, which means the whole thing is written in Python and runs on a Postgresql database server. One of  OpenERP most notable strengths is it’s ease of extension. OpenERP has long offered an impressive list of add-on modules, usually written by 3rd party software developers, extending the systems’ core functionality with vertical solutions, making the solution more appealing to many. I am not sure if existing OpenERP modules work with Tryton, but the Tryton team should at least make sure it’s as easy to write modules to Tryton as it is to OpenERP.

Tryton supports core ERP functionality - accounting, sales,purchasing and inventory management. Manufacturing and Project Management are not yet supported. You can read their F.A.Q here, and a list of improvements vs. OpenERP here.

Similar to other open source ERP projects, the project offers support, implementation and customization services, as the Tryton software can be freely downloaded from here.

We wish the Tryton team good luck with their project. Their investment into the fork demonstrate the ever increasing demand for open source business solution.

ATP can be also used in a more proactive manner. This post will demo how ATP can identify possible future stock availability problems within a specified time period, without requiring any user interactivity.

Batch ATP

Unlike the ATP viewer, which is an interactive application, the ATP Notifier works in batch mode. Using a scheduler, a  Talend job, connected to an Openbravo ERP system, is submitted. The job  examines the ATP vector of a list of products. Based on current stock levels, predicted demand (as explained in here) and supply transactions (either manufacturing or procurement orders), the job will indicate which products from the list might have their stock go below their designated safety stock levels, within a specific time period (a horizon), measured in weeks.

The user does not have to submit the actual job - it is run by an automatic scheduler at any given interval (once a day, once an hour etc.). The output of the job is an RSS feed, that can be read by any RSS reader.

Business RSS

A word about RSS - the RSS protocol was invented for people (like myself) who found themselves wasting too much valuable time browsing through numerous websites, looking for interesting things to read. With RSS, you don’t have to surf all those sites - you just register to their RSS feed, and check your RSS reader occasionally, to see if anything interesting is published.

Business users are similar - there are so many business events happening, it is almost impossible to track all of them. Going through endless screens, looking for possible issues with products or customers can be a huge time sink. And this is where RSS can help business users.

ATP Notifier

In the demo below, we run the ATP Notifier on one product (’Wine United states’), although we could do the same for as many products as we want. We run the Talend ATP Notifier job through a web service call, passing the number of weeks (horizon) as a parameter.

When we pass 6 or 7 weeks, there is no result - that means that within 7 weeks, stock will remain above safety stock levels for our product. But if we change the horizon to 8 weeks, we get an RSS reply, indicating there might be a problem with that product within that time period.

In production environment, though, you would not have to constantly change your horizon-we do that only for demo purposes. The idea is that for every product (or product category), you will define the horizon once. At any given interval (once a day, twice a day etc.), the batch job will run automatically, check all products, and reply with an RSS containing all the product that might have a problem with stock levels within the given horizon. It is up to the planner to solve the issues indicated by the ATP runner, by either creating new production order or purchasing order.

ATP Notifier Recorded Flash Demo - click image to view demo

Predictive ATP  is based on a prediction of future demand for a product, rather than on actual demand.

There are many ways to predict future demand. Actually, there are quite a few applications who’s sole purpose is to predict demand . One of the most simple, yet useful techniques is to use time series. By using time series, you examine all of your past demand transactions (sales orders, internal orders etc), and try to predict future demand for a specific product based on these past transactions.

For our purposes, we want to calculate past demand for a certain period, let’s say a month, or  week. So we need to come up with some kind of ‘average’ for that specific time period.

Some of the techniques used to calculate that average are:

1. Simple Average - you could just calculate (by summing all period quantities and divide that number by the number of periods) the average demand quantity for a given item at a given period, let’s say month, and predict that future sales will behave in a similar fashion. This is the most basic and simple method, but also highly unreliable.
2. Weighted Average- in most scenarios, you want to give higher weight to demand transactions that are more recent. for example, when you calculate your new  monthly average, you  could give a weight of 0.6 to the month that just ended and 0.4 to the last calculated average. That way, the impact of the last month on the average is much higher than previous months.
3. Weighted Exponential Average - a more sophisticated version of weighted average, exponential smoothing is a technique in which each month demand figures are multiplied by a factor that decreases exponentially.

The open source ATP viewer now supports all 3 methods of calculating demand. It also features a new ATP vector, that takes into account only the predicted future demand (instead of actual demand).

The way the predicted ATP works is by first calculating average monthly demand for a specific product, based on historical data, and then using that figure to reduce the amount of stock that will be available in the future for a specific time period. The predictive ATP is calculated weekly, so for any future week, the amount of available to promise stock decrease by the calculated monthly average demand, divided by 4.3 , the number of weeks in a month. Similar to the actual ATP, production or purchasing orders increase the amount of stock available to promise.

I highly recommend that you watch the first ATP viewer demo along with this one to understand the business value of the ATP viewer.

Open source ATP for Openrbavo - Recorded demo (click image below to view demo)

We plan to release the ATP viewer as open source, and also provide content that will make it work with several open source ERP systems. If you are interested in using the ATP viewer, please let us know.

You could also register to our RSS feed to stay up to date with more open source ERP news.

The A.T.P vector takes into account the amount of currently available stock, future supply (from manufacturing or procurement) and future demand (sales order, internal orders etc.). The A.T.P. quantity decreases due to customer orders (and possibly other transactions), and increases as new stock is available, through purchasing, manufacturing or customer returns.

I planned to provide a flash-based A.T.P. ‘viewer’ for open source ERP systems for some time now, and surprisingly enough, I’ve found this feature request on Openbravo’s issue tracker. So I decided to implement a version of A.T.P. that would run as a stand-alone flash application ( which can be easily embedded into your company’s portal).

But I wanted to develop something that would be generic enough so it can be used as an A.T.P. viewer for any open source ERP system (or any ERP system for that matter). I decided to use Talend as middleware. Talend is a powerful data processing tool, and provides one important feature - you can create ‘data services’ that read data from your ERP system, and expose it through a service call to any consuming client.

The client was using flash technology. The front-end was developed using Flex, and it is completely independent of the back-end system. It calls a couple of services, created by Talend, that provide the data used by the A.T.P. viewer. There is still further development required to make the A.T.P. viewer robust, but it is already useful in several scenarios.

I plan to release the whole thing as open source and would love to get help from anyone with relevant knowledge - more on that in future posts.

In the meantime, you can take a look at the A.T.P. viewer in the following recorded demo.

Impaortant! - the data (customer orders, production orders etc.) used in the recorded demo is sample data provided by Openbravo. The dates of the transactions are from 2006 and 2007. A.T.P. always looks forward, into the future. I had to use this data because I do not have access to a live system. So only for purpose of this demo, we assume the date now is somewhere during the year 2005, so all transactions occurring in 2006/7/8 are future transactions.

Open Source ATP Viewer Demo - click image below to view demo

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.

There are several approaches to providing BI capabilities to an ERP solution. The most common approach is to have two completely separate,dedicated systems - one for ERP, the other for BI. The BI piece will include a data warehouse, where operational data from the ERP systems is stored, a reporting tool and an analytical engine, working on top of the data in the data warehouse. An ETL tool, in charge of extracting data from the ERP system and uploading it to the data warehouse database, is also required.

The main advantage of this configuration is that it separates between the operational system and the analytical system. If you do not separate the two, you will find yourself with an ERP system that is overloaded with user queries, that might bring your operational users to a complete halt.

The disadvantage of the separation is that it can become a complicated, expensive and an unreliable process. Also, having to manage  additional systems (your BI servers) in your landscape has its overheads.

There is also a hybrid model, where some of the user queries are performed against the operational system, while some are done against the Bi servers.

It is interesting to compare the two leading open source ERP solutions, Openrbavo and Compiere, in their approaches to Bi functionality. Openbravo is talking about ‘embedding’ Pentaho’s modules into their ERP system, so there is no separation here. It makes things much easier (and much cheaper) for customers implementing Openbravo, as they have BI functionality out of the box. For Openbravo, it means they have to invest in developing that integration.

Compiere took a different approach. They decided they do not want lock-in with any specific BI vendor or tool, so they provided a business view layer, which allows system administrator to easily generate database views. These views are generic, allowing any 3rd party reporting or analysis tool easy access to Compiere’s data. The views could also be used by the ETL tool, in a separate ERP-BI configuration.

We are yet to see the Openbravo-Pentaho integration (it’s due to be released next month), but we’ll provide more details once its out.

To stay up to date on the latest open source ERP news, 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 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

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