Open Source ERP Guru

A couple of weeks ago open source ERPvendor Openbravo announced the beta release of the 2.40 version of its ERP product. There were quite a few enhancement released as part of 2.40, most notably in the financial module.

I decided to test-drive 2.40 on my Ubuntu Linux machine (it’s a 3-years old AMD Sempron machine with 512MB of RAM).

The installation files are available for download from Sourceforge. I decided to use the Bitrock installer. One thing to remember when you install O – you need to setup your machines’ local environment first( Java, Tomcat, PostgreSQL). Make sure you follow the instructions here.

Once you have the environment setup, using the Bitrock installer is easy as installing any windows application (just Next,Next,Next, supplying some parameters of your Java and DBMS environment). The installer spent more of the time on building the Opnebravo database objects.

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In our second Meet The CEO series we interviewed  Manel Sarasa, CEO of open source ERP vendor Openbravo.

First, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Manel and the entire Openbravo team for winning the European football (or soccer..) championship. It was truly an amazing tournament and I believe the best, most fun to watch team, won.

As for Openbravo, I see good things happening there. The recent 12M$ they raised injected a lot of positive energy into the project. Although raising money is always a good thing, it does bring a certain amount pressure, but I feel Openbravo is taking it the right way.

Opnebravo  started back in 2001, as a  project-based ERP solution. Having realized there is a demand for a professional, open source ERP solutions for the mid-market, the team continued to develop the web-based ERP offering, releasing it on sourceforge.

Openbravo boasts more than 1,000 downloads a day, has about 80 partners in over 30 countries and has around 1,000 live customers.

Manel also pointed to the Openbravo manifesto (I strongly recommend you read it) – a commitment by the project to continue supporting and further developing the Openbravo community and remaining a true open source offering. I believe that maintain the community and openness of the product was something agreed by the VCs  and was accepted to be part of the deal.

Listen to Meet The CEO – Openbravo’s Manel Sarasa Podcast

Meet The CEO – Interview with Openbravo’s CEO, Manel Sarasa

BTW-there is a short glitch at the beginning of the interview, I decided to leave it unedited, for your amusement.

The next few posts are going to show several possible methods of integration between Openbravo E.R.P. , Sugar C.R.M. and Pentaho BI. I think this type of integration might be very interesting for anyone looking for a complete business solution. C.R.M. is becoming increasingly popular, especially among SMB’s, as well as BI. I have chosen Openbravo as the ‘backend’ E.R.P. system, but whatever is demonstrated here can be implemented using other open source (or proprietary) E.R.P.’s as well.

This post will demonstrate a simple ETL process where new Openbravo customers records are transferred, through Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle), to SugarCRM and created as accounts. Obviously, in a real-life scenario this would not be a manual job as demonstrated here.

The recorded demo will be added, just like all other recorded demos, to our Flash Comparator page.

Data Transfer From E.R.P. To C.R.M.

There are several ways to go about this, and it really depends on your business scenario. You might want to decide that the moment a new customer record is created in Openbravo, the record is transferred to Sugar. To do that, you would have to customize Openbravo so that when the save button in Openbravo is clicked, the Pentaho Data Integration job is triggered, a file is created, followed by a trigger to an automatic upload of this file into SugarCRM. That is possible but not so simple and relatively error prone.

The second way would be to use web-services, or implement SOA (service oriented architecture). Assuming your C.R.M. (I still need to check that for Sugar) supports a ‘create customer’ web-service, a call would have to made where all the fields in the source customer record are mapped to the web-service input fields. To do that, you would need a web service client that is able to read the data from Openbravo,map it to the web-service input parameters and then call the SugarCRM web service. One of my next posts will present this option in details.

As for the process I have actually implemented – it is for demo purposes only. I have created a job that reads 3 Openbravo tables, containing some of the customer information I need to pass to Sugar (customer name,address information etc.). I have decided to join the 3 tables using an SQL query as this is  best practice provided  by Pentaho. A file is created by the job from the Openbravo data and then imported manually into Sugar.

The job I created would be better off used in a batch process, transferring a large amount of customers and triggered by a scheduler. So you could set up a scheduler to start this Pentaho Data Integration job every night and transfer all the customer records that where create in the past 24 hours.

Openbravo Customer to SugarCRM Account – Recorded flash demo

(Right-Click ‘Zoom In’ on the flash movie for better quality)
[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/openbravo2sugar.swf" height="480" width="700" /]

Lately I’ve been looking into integration between open source BI solution, Pentaho, and Openbravo ERP. After installing and setting up the different components, I decided I would start with a very simple task-a basic ETL process, just to get a feeling for Pentaho.

To make things a bit more interesting, I decided I’d throw SugarCRM into the mix. SugarCRM is the world’s leading open source CRM solution. It is written in php and runs on an Apache web server using Mysql as the database engine. My ETL job will transfer some customer information from Openbravo to SugarCRM – that would be a scenario for anyone who is using Openbravo and would like to start working on Sugar as a CRM solution.

After installing the Pentaho BI suite, I decided to take a look at their ETL offering,Kettel. It’s a java based tool, but since the design-time of ETL is a client-side activity,I decided to run it on off my Windows XP PC. ETL tools are part of every major BI offering  because they are used to upload large amount of data from operational systems (e.g. ERP) to data warehouses.

ETL tools are also used in migration processes-if you replace your ERP vendor, upgrade to a new version or transfer data from ERP to CRM, for example,you will need an ETL tool. Although ETL tools allows you to upload as many or as few records as you like, the true strength of this tools lie in their ability to perform well when transferring very large amounts of data,sometimes tens of millions of records. In our simple test we will transfer a small number of customer records.

Openbravo->SugarCRM, Customer->Account ETL process using Pentaho Kettel

Notice in the screen capture the source (Openbravo business partner table), the fields mapping step in the middle and the destination – a CSV file to be imported into SugarCRM.

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A couple of days ago I wrote about my intentions to work on integrating Pentaho, an open source BI solution and Openbravo, one of the leading open source ERP products. Implementing a BI solution on top of your ERP system can provide a lot of added value for your ERP project.

After I wrote about my Pentaho-Openbravo integration plans,I got some positive feedback about the idea, as it seems a natural fit for existing Openbravo customers.

I also got an interesting comment from the Openbravo community director. I understand that Openbravo already got a request from some of its customers to add BI functionality to the Openbravo Suite, and are working on providing the integration themselves. From reading their functional specification document, it seems like they are still considering which open source BI to integrate with. I believe the decision will be to integrate Pentaho.

Obviously, this is great news. I have no plans of developing anything in parallel to Openbravo. I will try to get more details about the scope and timeline of the Openbravo-Pentaho connector. I am going to continue to work on my own connectivity,hoping I can contribute with my knowledge to Openbravo’s ‘official’ efforts, but my connector will not be released to the community as I thought I might do.

Commercial BI-ERP Connectivity Ownership

An interesting thing to note is that in commercial enterprise software, the BI vendor is always in charge of the connectivity to the ERP (or any other backend) system. The BI vendor writes an ETL connectors or adapters that can consume data from major ERP systems. No additional efforts are required on behalf of the ERP vendor. In our case, it seems like the ERP vendor (e.g. Openbravo) is going to be in charge of developing the integration-writing code, publishing documentation and supporting the solution. I think it must be a cooperation between the two project, and the ownership of the connector should be on the BI side (Pentaho). We’ll have to see how it goes.

Funny Pentaho Clip

Pentaho Installation

The next post will be an open source BI Pentaho installation walkthrough on an Ubunu 8.04 Linux Machine. Stay tuned.

Great news coming from Openbravo,one of the leading open source ERP vendors – they have raised 12M$ in funding from several European VC’s. That is really great news for anyone who is involved in the industry.

It is yet another indication that open source ERP is heading straight into the mainstream of enterprise applications. With such a strong round of funding, you can expect more trust from potential customers as Openbravo secured its business for the next couple of years. Nobody wants to invest in an ERP project only to find his ERP vendor out of business two years down the line. We can expect a strong growth in both Openbravo adoption, especially in Europe and in south America, as well as in the entire open source ERP industry.

Openbravo’s commitment to its open source community will remain a big question mark. With additional stakeholders in the company (the new VCs), it will become increasingly challenging for Openbravo to keep its community of volunteers happily involved. It will be interesting to follow up on that issue.

Finally, this round of funding raises again the possibility of a large acquisition of one of the open source ERP vendors by one of IT mega vendors. I discussed this subject thoroughly here. When considering the potential for an exit for one of the vendors, this round of investment seems like a pretty smart move by the VCs.

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.

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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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