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Open Source ERP Guru

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Extend Your ERP With Modules

February 22nd, 2009

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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Posted in ERP | 3 Comments »

Openbravo Redesigned User Experience

February 20th, 2009

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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Posted in ERP | 1 Comment »

xTuple 2008 Growth: Yet More Impressive Results

February 19th, 2009

It’s earnings season for open source ERP vendors, and growth is phenomenal. Following record results reported by Compiere, a leading open source ERP vendor, xTuple reports an astonishing 250% growth in revenue in 2008, year over year. Since all vendors in this space are privately held companies, we do not have actual revenue figures, but growth across the sector is impressive.
In times when proprietary ERP vendors report slowing revenue growth and layoffs, attributed to the economic slowdown, growth of open source ERP vendors (in the triple digits) is truly unique . Since many organizations are now more cost aware, the obvious cost advantage of open source ERP (no license fees), along with a critical mass of production customers and a new level of maturity, both in terms of technology and channel partners, make these solutions an option any smart CIO must consider.
xTuple also reported their customer base more than doubled during 2008, another tremendous achievement by the xTuple team, led by CEO Ned Lilly. We couldn’t put it any better than Ned did:

“We are very pleased with our success in 2008 and are seeing continued growth in 2009, as larger enterprises scrutinize their current software vendor relationships, and growing companies look for greater visibility into their operations to maximize profitability in tough times. The current economic climate has made more urgent the need for low-cost, high-value solutions that deliver immediate return on investment. As a result, more companies are looking to open source solutions. xTuple has been at the forefront of bridging the worlds of open source and ERP software, and will continue to innovate and lead in response to this massive market need.”

Will 2009 be the year of open source ERP?

Posted in Industry News | No Comments »

Should Open Source ERP Vendors Head To The Valley?

February 16th, 2009

I read this nice post by Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of open source mobile company Funambol. He got a chance to meet with Manel Sarasa, CEO of Opnebravo, and discuss the idea of moving the Openbravo headquarters to the silicon valley. Manel have been pondering on the idea for a while now, currently without concrete plans to make the move.

I was wondering if moving to the valley would be a smart move by Openbravo, or any other open source ERP vendors. To answer that question, you need to break open source ERP to two parts – open source and ERP.

As far as open source is concerned, I agree with Fabrizio’s argument that because there are many large open source companies headquartered in the valley, it’s a good place to be in. Networking is the main reason, and any businessman will tell you, you have to network to survive and flourish. Also, if you do have plans to be acquired by one of the large IT vendors (Oracle, Sun etc.), being located closer to them would definitely make the acquisition process easier.

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Openbravo Recruits Top Guns, Compiere Wins Big Customer

February 14th, 2009

Despite the contracting economy, open source ERP vendors are steaming full ahead, never looking back. In this news roundup,  Openbravo attracts two new top leaders and Compiere reports strong growth for 2008 and wins a huge customer.

Openbravo announced two new senior management recruits. Jesper Balser, one of 3 Navision founders, joined Opnebravo as a board member. Balser co-founded Navision, a danish ERP solution for the SME market back in 1984. In 1992, Navision was acquired by Microsoft for about 1.5B US$, and the Navision solution was integrated into Microsoft Dynamics, the business management suite (Navision was later renamed Microsoft Dynamics NAV). Balser brings a huge amount of experience into the table, from building, to expanding and then selling a successful ERP for the SME market. It’s not clear yet if Balser also invested his own cash in the company.

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Business Partner Locator For Openbravo

January 19th, 2009

In our last post we presented the first application released under the Open App Factory project – Inventory Transactions Viewer. Today we are adding the second application: Business Partner Locator.

The BP Locator application uses a Google map to display the location of any business partner you manage in your Openbravo system. There are two benefits to using the BP Locator:

1. Business partner address validation – the BP Locator will indicate how accurate the address of the selected business partner is. This is very useful as wrong address data can cost you a lot of money and some unhappy customers.

2. Instant access to contact info – from the BP Locator screen, you can easily access all contact info of your customer or vendor, such as email, homepage address or phone number.

All Open App Factory applications available to download from the project’s download page.

We plan to continue providing the community with more free, open source business applications running on top of open source ERP and CRM systems. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact us.

To stay informed on the latest applications released under the Open App Factory project, register to our RSS feed.

Business Partner Locator – Recorded Demo. Click image to view demo.

Posted in Open App Factory | No Comments »

Open App Factory – Business Application Widgets

January 13th, 2009

We are happy to announce that we are ready to add our own contribution to the world of open source ERP, with the alpha release of Open App Factory.

Open App Factory (OAF) is a set of business application widgets, running on top of open source ERP and CRM systems. The purpose of OAF is two-fold: extend functionality of current ERP and CRM systems, and improve user experience. A sample of such applications were published in past blog posts – here and here.

The first released application, available to download from our Sourceforge project page, is Inventory Transaction Viewer – an application widget which provides insight into historical inventory levels for a specific product (see recorded demo below). The Inventory Transactions Viewer was tested against an Opnebravo installation, and will probably work with Compiere also ( we will test that soon).

All applications are free and open source. A binary distribution is also available, so anyone with a working Openbravo installation can download, configure and use the apps.

We will continue to release free,open source business application widgets. If you have any ideas or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you.

Inventory Transaction Viewer Demo – click image to view

Posted in Open App Factory | No Comments »

Business Conversations Module For Open Source ERP

November 25th, 2008

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.

Posted in Business Processes | No Comments »

Tryton – A New Kid On The Open source ERP Block

November 23rd, 2008

A couple of days ago I got an email announcing the 1.0 release of a new open source ERP solution, called Tryton. It was a pleasant surprise, as I haven’t heard of any new ERP project in a long time.

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.

Posted in Industry News | No Comments »

Business Events Notification With RSS – ATP Notifier

November 21st, 2008

We already domed the interactive ATP (Available To Promise) viewer, which is very useful in identifying and preventing stock level problems of specific products, that can lead to unhappy customers. It can also be used to provide reliable answer to your customers’ stock related inquiries.

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

Posted in Supply Chain Management | No Comments »