Open Source ERP Guru

Infoworld held its annual ‘Best of Open Source Software Awards’ (aka BOSSIES). The winners are elected by a panel of Infoworld editors (not by the masses). There were some very interesting categories, such as platform and middleware, networking and enterprise applications.

The open source software award for enterprise applications were subdivided to even more interesting categories-ERP, CRM, BI and Content Management, to name a few.

The big winner of the open source ERP category this year is Compiere. Compeire has been around longer than any other open source ERP project and some of its code still lives inside other projects. They were probably the earliest adopters of the hybrid open source model, offering paid services on top of its free, open source ERP application.

This couldn’t have come at a better timing for Compiere, as they will be shortly announcing a new release with over 400 new enhancements.

Inforworld explains why it chose Compiere as the winner in open source ERP category:

Compiere delivers a good, general-purpose ERP package along with basic CRM functionality. You get financials, HR/payroll services, procurement and inventory management, as well as general sales and good reporting. Compiere recently improved both security — now showing data-level granularity — and the user experience, with a browser-based UI and stronger search facilities…

Other notable winners in the open source enterprise category are Pentaho for BI, SugarCRM for..well..CRM and Jasper Reports for reporting.

Congratulations to Compiere and to all the other winners. It’s great to see how mature the open source enterprise application industry is becoming.

Sources within Compiere, one of the leading open source ERP vendors, tell us that a major release  will be announced next week. Compiere have been working closely with customers to enhance its popular open source ERP offering.

The new release will include over 400 new enhancements (guess the Compiere QA team have been  pretty busy..). A new Business View Layer will be shipped – this layer will provide simple and secure access to Compiere’s operational data, to be consumed by reporting and analysis tools.

Compiere’s decision to release the Business View Layer means it will focus entirely on developing ERP functionality, enabling business users to use  their favorite reporting and analysis tools (Excel, Crystal Reports etc.) to analyze the relevant operational data.

Reporting and The Business User

Business users love reports. They want to be able to easily design,test and run the reports by themselves. Many of them are very familiar with office productivity tools and want to leverage that knowledge to analyze their ERP data.

From an ERP project perceptive, it is always a challenge to decide which approach to take – one approach is  to provide an access layer to the ERP’s data and invest zero time and energy into developing a dedicated reporting engine within the ERP application. The other approach would be to develop reporting tools integrated into the ERP application itself. That would make it more simple for the user, as he needs to access only a single application (the ERP) to design and generate reports. The problem here is that users have so many requirements from a reporting tool that too often, too much development horsepower goes into reporting, at the expanse of core ERP functionality.

Compiere decided to forgo development of its own reporting and analysis tool and focus on core ERP functionality enhancement. We will testdrive the new Business View Layer and let you know what we think.

Stay tuned for the official announcement and our test by registering to our RSS feed.

Openbravo and Compiere, arguably the most popular open source ERP solutions, are both expanding their activities globally.

• Compiere announced a new partnership in Spain with local software company,Directive Soft. I believe that beyond the importance of the Spanish open source ERP market, Compiere is trying to make a point by establishing partnership in the country where Openbravo is created. In any competitive situation, making grounds in your competitors own country is always important and often given special attention. It’s like you are saying “I am so much better than my competition that even in his own country he is loosing customer to me”.
• Openbravo, after announcing a business oriented tour in Latin America,are now holding two technical workshops-one in Miami,Florida and the other one in Barcelona, their hometown. Best of all, at least according to the press release, participation is free of charge! That’s a great way to expand and build trust with the community around your open source project. It also increases the level of knowledge around the product which is crucial to the success of production implementation of any ERP software.
• Openbravo will participate in this year’s Open Source Business Conference. The conference looks really promising with participant such as HP, Microsoft, RedHat, Novell, SugarCRM, Pentaho and XTuple, the company behind OpenBooks open source ERPopen source ERP. This year’s conference will focus on ‘Putting Open Source To Work’. I’d love to be there, maybe next year..

Software projects are on a constant cycle of development, testing, releasing and fixing. open source ERP projects are not different.

I would like to update on the latest released version of the different solutions and elaborate a little about the projects’ development roadmaps.

Openbravo

Openbravo latest release is R2.35 maintenance pack 1 which was released back in early January 2008. It contains mainly bug fixes, focusing on improving stability – no new functionality was added. Openbravo have been lately releasing an impressive amount of localizations for countries such as south Africa, Romania, Venezuela, Malaysia, Singapore, The Netherlands, Argentina, Poland and France. Localization for ERP software is so important because without it, it’s almost impossible to use the software due to language differences and local accounting regulations.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The next series of blog posts will introduce Compiere, the most popular open source ERP solution today. I know some would disagree about the open source nature of Compiere, but that is a separate discussion.

We will start by creating a Client – or Tenant – in our vanilla Compiere system. After that, we will create a business partner, a product and a sales order. That would allow us to compare Compiere to Openbravo and later, to additional open source ERP solutions.

Needless to say, a flash tutorial of the Compiere initial client setup is attached to this post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Compiere is the most popular open source ERP software to date – largest number of downloads, channel partners,consultants and live customers. The first ever ERP software I installed was Compiere, back in 2002. It was quite remarkable back then – for me,ERP software was this huge,complicated software that requires 10 days to install,not mentioning the money you would have to pay for licenses. I desperately looked for a 30-days trial of commercial ERP solutions but soon realized I would have to be the CIO of a 1B$+ company to get any attention from those guys.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most important evaluation criteria for open source ERP is project activity. The Sourceforge graveyard is full of open source projects skeletons. When you measure a projects activity, the most important thing to measure is trends, or the rate of change in the parameters you measure.

In the last few days, I have been collecting data from the Sourceforge statistics RSS. The following graph displayes the number of downloads per day for the most popular open source ERP projects (this is still Beta so numbers might vary):

Please remember that the statistics were not checked thoroughly so actual numbera might vary!.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adempiere is a spin-off project from Compiere, arguably the most popular open source ERP solution on the market today. Whenever that kind of spin-off happens, especially from an open source project, you know that the members that left are hungry. They are hungry to prove they can do things better than the original project,otherwise they would not have left. Going to Adempiere’s website, I was anxious to see how the Adempiere project is doing.

Read the rest of this entry »