Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Choosing the right ERP vendor




Searching for the correct Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) can be a difficult and time consuming task. Not to mention your headaches associated with trying to find a vendor who can complete the task in a fashion that is both flexible, allows for easy installation and is affordable. 


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Looking at the basics of an ERP solution. There are no fixed rules (except the ones implied by the large “box” software companies) that say you must have specific modules within your solution. Most companies searching are looking for a solution that will help them organize and streamline their daily procedures. Generally, companies will utilize applications such as project management, scheduling, order entry/processing, preventative maintenance (PM), human resources (HR), customer relations management (CRM) and accounting. Which ever applications are implemented into an ERP solution, they should have the capability of working together to help your business maintain the structure they are looking for.



As per latest poll taken by cio.com core ERP modules were used chiefly for  

  1. Accounting and financial applications (96%)

  2. Procurement, order processing and supplier management (78%)

  3. Inventory management (64%) and

  4. HR management and payroll functions (55%).








As per what areas of their business ERP worked best, respondents overwhelmingly cited

  1. Financial (70%)

  2. Procurement, order processing, supplier management (42%)

  3. Inventory management (33%) and

  4. HR management or payroll (26%).





As the poll clearly states one size does not fit all. Each company and industry in general will have different business models and their core modules will differ. It will be difficult to find an ERP solution that will be made specifically for your needs. Most solutions which are available are available in the market is “pre-packaged”.  These are offered by top ERP solution providers as a more standardized package which leads businesses to believe the strictly structured software will allow their business to improve their bottom line as well as productivity. While the software package may warrant some value to your organization it will not work very well for each specific business with out requiring significant changes to the software. For example in the manufacturing industry or construction industries for instance this model will not work because manufactures require agility within their software solutions.



This is a great scheme many large software companies propose to companies who are seeking a new software application. This Best Practices has an overall goal of selling the most software possible without making modifications to the software application. The major problem many companies then begin to face is that the software is not flexible enough to meet their needs. No two companies are the same and by forcing them to utilize software which is not engineered for their environment there is a high potential for loss of profit and failure of the software application. Companies need to maintain their competitive edge and to due so they are lead to believe a best practices application will lead them in the right direction. Possibly after a few hundred of thousands of dollars in changes they will have the ability to innovate and outsmart their competition. However, there are better choices which do not cause the software companies to loose their valuable time and money hassling with the pre-packaged software.



Another model some companies offer are custom solutions which are great because they are designed for the company but are very difficult to upgrade, sometimes they are completely impossible to upgrade. This is discouraging considering the amount of money companies will spend to purchase a solution of this size and not have the capability of changing it as their company changes.









Now sigh a breath of relief because in Qualian Technologies Pvt Ltd we understand each company needs and have been the pioneers in the art of tailored ERP solutions. That is why we offer light weight, flexible, affordable and easily installable solutions. These are tailored software solutions according to your needs. Tailored solutions are made for the requirements of your organization without the lengthy development periods and difficulty of upgrading. These solutions are agile software solutions for they are highly configurable and offer all of the advantages of a custom software solution along with the best characteristics of a canned software solution. Qualian’s tailored solutions will have the most success for your organisation, additionally, they will have the capability of growing and changing as your organization continues to do so.



Our Industry Vertical ERP Solutions include



  • Construction Industry

  • Machinery and Equipment

  • Educational Institutions

  • Health Care

  • Retail Consumer Products

  • Mining

  • Oil and Gas Industry

  • Textile Mills

  • Whole Sale Distribution








Monday, December 14, 2009

Openbravo ERP documentation walkthrough

You watched the introductory video and the customer success stories, you overviewed the product features, the solutions and the services around, you tried the demos… and you liked it! What is the next step? What else can Openbravo do for you?
Openbravo Wiki is the documentation repository around Openbravo ERP: hundreds of articles covering topics such as the installation, the localization and the development of this product. Don’t get lost among this vast number of free resources: these are the key articles that you can not miss.
  1. The Functional Documentation will help you to better understand the functional footprint of Openbravo ERP: Procurement, Manufacturing and Sales flows, Financial concepts and Platform related topics such as Modularity or Alerts are some of the topics covered.
  2. The Openbravo ERP demo is nice, but you want to have the absolute control over Openbravo ERP installed into your local machine. The Installation Guide details the steps to install Openbravo ERP by yourself, depending on your expertise: Virtual Appliance and Ubuntu installation for beginners and Custom installation for experts (including the installation of the Openbravo ERP environment stack made of the Sun JDK, Apache Ant, Oracle or PostgreSQL databases and Apache Tomcat).
  3. Once you installed Openbravo ERP, you would like to know how to use it. The User Manual will tell you the meaning of every single window, tab and field within Openbravo ERP.
  4. Now that you have an understanding of your Openbravo ERP installation from an end-user perspective, let’s configure it following the steps of the Configuration Manual: model your enterprise, setup accounting, taxes, roles and users, import your legacy data, etc…
  5. Your Openbravo ERP installation is now nicely configured and running smoothly, but you want to get more: let’s develop it! The Developer’s Guide, presented some time ago by Martin Taal, will provide you with theory and examples to take advantage of the Openbravo open source platform. No more excuses not to develop Openbravo ERP extensions and localizations! :)
  6. Doubts and questions? Resolve them contacting other Openbravo ERP users in the Openbravo Communication Channels: free mailing lists, forums and IRC channels open 24/7 to the Openbravo Community.
  7. Now that you are an Openbravo ERP expert, would you like to contribute to this open source project and help growing its Community? Take a look at the Contributor’s Guide to discover how you can help other Openbravo ERP users.
Seven must read articles have been presented but there are many others: find them using the built in Mediawiki search engine, the Google Custom search engine or external tools such as Ubiquity, presented by Iván Perdomo some days back.
The topic that you were looking for is incomplete, out of date or does not even exist? Openbravo ERP documentation is evolving and growing daily: you are welcome to provide your feedback, opinions and requests for improvement.
Enjoy Openbravo ERP documentation on-line or download it all with ScrapBook as explained by Galder Romo: c’mon, it’s free!


Source:http://planet.openbravo.com/

Friday, December 4, 2009

Getting started with Openbravo



Contents

[hide]

Introduction

This document provides a list of resources for people evaluating or getting started with Openbravo ERP.
NOTICE: We are in the process of updating this page please go to the forum "Getting Started" page - your opinions please for more information.

About Openbravo

What Openbravo ERP can do

Modules at Openbravo ERP

Evaluating Openbravo ERP

In order to optimize the time you invest in discovering Openbravo, we recommend that you follow the following approach.
  1. Start with the on-line demo. This is a very easy way to get your hands on the product and start exploring its capabilities. You can follow our step by step tutorials to experience some of the main business flows.
  2. Install a Community Appliance. Since the on-line demo is a shared demo environment, there are some limitations on what you can do with it. In particular, we cannot give you system administrator privileges and we are refreshing the system on a daily basis. If you want to evaluate Openbravo's flexibility and experiment with different configurations, or if you want to have a persistent data set to complete your evaluation, you need your own system. The easiest way to get one, is to install a Community Appliance which is intended to allow you to get a full Openbravo ERP server for evaluation purposes with minimal installation hassles.
  3. Once you have completed your evaluation, you are ready to start your implementation project, either with the Community Edition or with the Professional Subscription.
Starting a new project
Understanding Openbravo Releases
Forums and FAQ's
As many open source project, Openbravo ERP has its own Forge where our Community collaborates around the project. There you can access the project forums and review on going projects to extend the ERP functionality through modules, integrate it with external solutions, or to deliver services around it.
For Frequently Asked Questions, visit Openbravo FAQ. This repository of questions is updated every day with Openbravo forum posts.

Full installation guide

Openbravo installation has two different flavors.
Openbravo ERP virtual appliances
Openbravo ERP virtual appliances are a quick and easy manner of setting up Openbravo ERP for testing or development purposes since environment stack is already included and configured.
Openbravo ERP custom installation
Openbravo ERP custom installation is the mean to install Openbravo ERP in a production environment. This way of installation, requires a previous installation and configuration of the whole environment stack.
Openbravo ERP upgraders
Openbravo ERP can be upgrade from several versions to newer ones using a graphical assistant.

Functional documentation

In the link below you can find the functional documentation of Openbravo ERP. The purpose of this documentation is to describe, from a logical stand point, what business processes and what functions are supported in the product and how they are implemented. This documentation gives you a very good idea of what can be achieved with the product; it is NOT, however, a detailed step by step implementation guide or a user guide

Configuration manual

In the link below you can find a document that explains how to set up the ERP in order to succeed working with Openbravo ERP. This is a step by step manual and very useful. Still in progress

Developing with Openbravo

The Openbravo development environment includes a mix of tools and methodologies that make Openbravo developers' life easier.
  • Openbravo Developers Guide: a detailed guide on setting up your development environment, understanding the system architecture and how to build new features.

How to contribute to Openbravo

There are many ways to make Openbravo ERP a better product.

QA process. Acceptance testing

Openbravo QA team makes sure that all the releases have a minimum quality.
Whenever a a release is launched, an acceptance process is executed.
Retrieved from "http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/Getting_started_with_Openbravo"
This page was last modified 11:51, 24 August 2009. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Spain License.

RM updates: upgrade automation, documentation, appliance security

RM updates: upgrade automation, documentation, appliance security

by Juan Pablo Aroztegi

Following with our round of updates, here’s the latest news from the Release Management Team:
  • Continuous Integration: there is a new job that tests upgrading from the last stable MP to the latest daily OBX file. This has been done using the command line. A graphical test is in progress.
  • Live builds: the main page has been refactored and it now includes detailed build information as well as the runtime Tomcat log.
  • Appliance security updates: previous versions of the appliance are vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack during TLS session renegotiation. This vulnerability has been addressed in this update. Check the full changelog at the newly created appliance release notes.
  • Documentation: check the new document explaining our stack configuration in the appliances.
  • Issue Tracker: we are working on upgrading to version 1.2.0, which includes new interesting features. Many things have changed in this version so this process will take longer than a regular update. A new testing server will be announced soon.
  • Download area: the SourceForge download area has been updated to include only the latest 3 releases. The older ones have been moved to the 09-openbravo-old-releases directory.
For a complete list of the on-going stories we’ve been working on, check the Sprint 28 page of our Scrum spreadsheet.
Tagged: Continuous Integration, Issue Tracker, Security, testing

Source:http://planet.openbravo.com/

Openbravo ERP 2.50MP9 available Release date: December 1st, 2009

 Openbravo ERP 2.50MP9 available


Check out what's new, the fixed issues and frequently asked questions about the latest release of Openbravo ERP. As always, you are encouraged to tell us what you think, by raising an issue in issues.openbravo.com or discussing it in the Open discussion forum.

Fixed issues

  • 11567: columns using reference Number are mapped to Float instead of BigDecimal. As a result there has been the following critical API change.
  • 11099: Show user in session tab.
  • 11239: The images on a field filled by a user can not be seen by other user with other role with access to the window.
  • 10991: Export language does not work properly when core is not indevelopment.
  • 11055: export.database and update.database could be 1min faster always.
  • Several fixes to improve support on modularity and build process:
    • 11319: Not possible for 2 different modules to add windows with same name.
    • 11228: The ad_menu is not correctly managed with modularity.
    • 10792: Initial client setup not working using two datasets.
    • 11014: Module dependencies must be taken into account while installing several dependent modules.
    • 11029: Templates shouldn't allow *data package* to avoid database objects.
    • 11096: create.database should stop if database could not be created.
    • 11127: If the rebuild process fails when installing a module, the next rebuild deletes the content from ad_module.
    • 11238: If generated entities do not correspond with the content of the application dictionary, export.database doesn't work.
  • 11260: The accounting process through Background and DB tables did not work properly in same scenarios (depending on the structure of accounting schemas).
  • 10621: The general ledger journal report cut the gl_entries in HTML format.
  • 10752: System gets blocked while installing modules.
  • 10574: The conversion rate table has to save the rates with more decimals.

Check the complete list of fixed issues.

API changes

There has been a critical change in Openbravo 2.50 public API. The DAL implementation of columns referenced as Number in the Application Dictionary are mapped now to BigDecimal instead of Float. Getters and setters for those columns are no longer using the Float data type but BigDecimal. See a more detailed explanation in this forum post.
Check the complete API changes.

Download Details

MP module
Appliance

Source code tarball Mercurial
OBX file QEMU-Parallels VirtualBox VMware Xen Download Clone (tag: 2.50MP9)


Image:Bulbgraph.png   These are Community deliverables. The Professional Subscription can be downloaded from the Partner Restricted Area.

Installation, updates and upgrades

  • To install or evaluate this Openbravo ERP release, follow the installation guide.
  • To update an existing Openbravo ERP from an earlier release of 2.50 follow the update instructions.
  • To upgrade your existing system from 2.3x or 2.40 to the latest version of 2.50 follow the upgrade here

Other resources and links

  • Get information about previous releases in the Release History page.
  • If you are looking for the Openbravo ERP Cloud Appliance release notes, check this page instead.
  • Get more details on Openbravo ERP.

Special thanks

Finally, we give our thanks to the Openbravo Community which continues to support us with their valuable time and knowledge. We also thank all Openbravo users for making Openbravo ERP a huge success.
Retrieved from "http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/ERP/2.50/Release_Notes/2.50MP9"
This page was last modified 08:26, 3 December 2009. Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Spain License.

Category: Release Notes ERP


Source:

http://wiki.openbravo.com/wiki/ERP/2.50/Release_Notes/2.50MP9