OpenERP

Foreword

Information Systems have played an increasingly visible role over the past several years in improving the competitiveness of business. More than just tools for handling repetitive tasks, they are used to guide and advance all of a company’s‘ daily activities. Integrated management software is today very often a key source of significant competitive advantage.

The standard response to a need for responsiveness, reliability, and rapidly increasing expectations is to create an organization based on departments with a clear linear structure, integrated around your operating processes. To increase efficiency amongst salespeople, accountants, logistics staff and everyone else you should have a common understanding of your problems.

For this you need a common language for shared references, policies and communication. An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system provides the ideal platform for this common reference point.

Open Source software at the Service of Management

Risks and integration costs are important barriers to all the advantages you gain from such systems. That is why, today, few small- and medium-sized companies use ERP. In addition, the larger ERP vendors such as SAP, Microsoft and Oracle have not been able to reconcile the power and comprehensive cover of an ERP system with the simplicity and flexibility wanted by the users. But this is exactly what small and medium enterprises are looking for.

The development processes of Open Source Software, and the new business models adopted by their developers, provide a new way of resolving such cost and quality issues for this kind of enterprise software.

To make an ERP system fully available to small and medium enterprises, cost reduction is the first priority. Open source software makes it possible to greatly reduce development costs by aggressive reuse of open source software libraries; to eliminate intermediaries (the distributors), with all of their expensive sales overhead; to cut out selling costs by free publication of the software; and to considerably reduce the marketing overhead.

Since there is open interaction among thousands of contributors and partners working on the same project, the quality of the resulting software greatly benefits from the scrutiny. And you cannot be everything at once: accountant, software developer, salesperson, ISO 9001 quality professional, specialist in agricultural products, expert in the customs and habits of pharmaceutical vendors, just as a start.

Faced with these wide-ranging requirements, what could be better than a worldwide network of partners and contributors? Every single person adds own contributions according to his or her professional competence. Throughout this book you will see that the results exceed any reasonable expectations when such work is well organized.

But the real challenge of development is to make this solution simple and flexible, as well as complete. And to reach this level of quality you need a leader and co-ordinator who can organize all of these activities. So the development team of Tiny ERP, today called OpenERP, is responsible for most of the organization, synchronization and coherence of the software.

And OpenERP offers great performance in all these areas!

The OpenERP Solution

Because of its modularity, collaborative developments in OpenERP have been cleanly integrated, enabling any company to choose from a large list of available functions. As with most open source software, accessibility, flexibility and ease of use are important keywords for development. Experience has shown that there is no need to train users for several months on the system, because they can just download it and use it directly.

So you will find modules to suit all kinds of needs, allowing your company to build its customized system by simply grouping and configuring the most suitable modules. Hundreds of modules are available.

They range from specific modules like the EDI interface for agricultural products, which has been used to interface with Match and Leclerc stores, up to the generic demonstration automation module for ordering sandwiches, which can take care of the eating preferences of your staff.

The results are rather impressive. OpenERP (originally called Tiny ERP) is a Management Software that is downloaded more than any other in the world, with over 600 downloads per day. Today it is available in 18 languages and has a worldwide network of partners and contributors. Over 800 developers participate in the projects on the collaborative development system.

To our knowledge, OpenERP is the only management system which is routinely used not only by big companies but also by very small companies and independent companies. This diversity is an illustration of the software’s flexibility: a rather elegant coordination between people’s functional expectations of the software and great ease of use.

And this diversity is also found in the various sectors and trades which use the software, including agricultural products, textiles, public auctions, IT, and trade associations.

Last but not least, such software has arisen from the blend of high code quality, well-judged architecture and use of free technologies. In fact, you may be surprised (if you are an IT person) to find that the download size of OpenERP is only around 6 MB. When that is expanded during installation its size is mostly attributable to all the official translations that are packaged with it, not the operating code. We’ve moved a long way from the days when the only people who could be expected to benefit from ERP were the owners of a widget factory on some remote industrial estate.

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