Open Source ERP Guru

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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We are delighted to launch Flash Comparator – our latest contribution to the open source ERP community.

The Flash Comparator is a single entry point to our entire archive of flash tutorials that accompany many of our posts.

Within a single page, you can now compare how different open source ERP solutions handle different business scenarios, with high quality,commented flash recordings of the latest versions of all major open source ERP offerings. Moving from demo to demo is as simple as selecting what you want to see from a drop down menu.

We are constantly recording new tutorials, adding more offering to our portfolio. If you are interested in comparing open source ERP solutions, the Flash Comparator should be added to your bookmark.

To use the Flash Comparator, go to the Flash Comparator Page, or use the top menu.

As always, we are interested in getting feedback from you, so any suggestions will be welcomed.

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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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.

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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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One of the important things for many of my blog’s readers is to get an initial feeling on how each open source ERP solution looks and feels.

Therefore, I will start adding flash clips along with some of the tutorials I am writing. The first flash tutorial I made is a recording showing how to create an initial Client in Openbravo open source ERP.
If you plan to follow the flash to create you first Openbravo Client, you should also read the original guide.

I am still working on getting the flash clip to play full screen properly. I would really appreciate comments – on flash clip playing speed,size of screen,level of details or any other suggestion.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/InitialSetupOpenbravo.swf" height="250" width="427" play="false"/]

To view the flash ERP tutorial in a larger screen, click on “Read Complete Article”

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