Open Source ERP Guru

One of our readers, Chris, commenting on Open Source ERP Activity Trends, had some very good questions and I decided to answer them, one by one, in a dedicated post.

Q: Is Opensource integral to the success of companies like Compiere and Openbravo, or is it more a marketing tool?

A: I’ll start by answering the latter part of the question – definitely NO!, it’s not a marketing tool. All open source projects start with a genuine intention of making things better. Programmers grouping together to write a piece of software for no money, usually in their spare time (after working 10 hours for their commercial employer) don’t think about marketing. They only think about writing the smartest,cleanest,coolest software ever written. And many such projects yield some the best software ever written – the Linux kernel, The Apache web server,the Firefox browser.
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 »

If you read my post 3 Core Business Processes Open Source ERP Must Support you already know that there are at least 402 open source software projects listed as ERP solutions in Sourceforge. You also know what are the core scenarios a real ERP solution should support.
One of Open Source ERP Guru’s main objectives is to provide valuable information for companies looking into ERP solutions in general and open source ERP solutions in particular, and the first thing to do is to narrow the list of 402 down to a more manageable number.
The following is a list of open source ERP solutions that can be called ‘true’ ERP, are open source and (at least partly) freely available:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you go to Sourceforge.net, a website that provides an open source project development platform,and browse to the ERP category, you will find no less than 402 results! That’s quite an amazing number, but if you try to dig in a little bit around that category,you will notice that many projects are actually only CRM (Customer Relationship Management),SCM (Supply Chain Management), accounting or HR applications. They do not fully support the functionality required from a real ERP solutions.

So how would you define an ERP system? My post An Introduction to ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning is a good starting point. If you are interested in implementing ERP in your organization, or are a consultant who is looking into open source ERP solutions,you must make sure the solutions you are considering does support all required businesses processes.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the main goals of OS ERP Guru is to provide a comprehensive,professional comparison of open source ERP solutions,providing value to our readers looking into open source ERP solutions to run their business.
Due to the complexity of ERP projects,there are many factors which have to be considered before deciding on which ERP solution to implement.We have chosen the 10 most important evaluation criteria,which we will use in our open source ERP comparison benchmark matrix.

Read the rest of this entry »