I have been following a project called ERP5 (www.erp5.org) for a couple of years now. It sounds pretty slick. It is a framework for building an ERP system. ERP systems are BIG money and tend to be a nightmare to implement and take forever. I think an open source ERP system such as ERP5 has a lot of potential to make ERP simpler and cheaper. It is installed at a number of sites in Europe but hardly any in the US. The company who originally made it is French. Most of what little dumentation exists is in French. There really isn't much documentation or even much community surrounding this project. Nexedi GPL'd it but because no docs are available on it and because ERP is so complicated virtually nobody has picked it up. They claim that there are many users of it and many implementations underway but because of trade secret issues nobody wants to talk about their implementations so the erp5 mailing list gets only one or two messages a week. However, the developers are on the list and do respond promptly to questions but you have to be specific and can't just show up and say "I know nothing about erp, teach me!"
Nexedi is happy to have me fly out to France and pay a truckload of money (I haven't even bothered to ask specifics) for instruction in how to set it up. Unfortunately that isn't an option for me. ERP5 is based on the Zope web application server and makes use of both ZODB and MySQL (mainly just for object indexing) and seems to have a cool system of producing business templates to implement the custom functionality every company will need. I have been developing my own Zope products lately for several web application projects I am working on and I am getting fairly familiar with it. The learning curve is huge but once you reach the top (I'm not at the top yet, maybe halfway though) I can see how it is a very attractive platform for web development. There is big money to be made here...if I could figure out the software. Anyone with more ERP/business experience than I have interested in going in on figuring this out together and perhaps doing some projects together in the future? Hopefully with my knowledge of zope/python and someone elses knowledge of ERP we can reverse engineer the system and put it to work for us. There are technical papers on the net as to its theory of operation although they didn't help me too much. If anyone knows of an company needing an ERP implementation Nexedi (the company who made ERP5) told me they would be willing to do the implementation with me such that the project could fund my training on-the-job. So drop me a line if you know someone needing ERP. If interested in ERP5 you can download the livecd from erp5.org and play with it. It is pretty cool in that you can actually see the software but it is somewhat useless in that an ERP system always requires lots of custom configuration so even though you can get it running in seconds you cannot actually *do* much useful with it. Since it is always easier to learn something when you actually have an intended use I have a perfect first project: The whole reason I am looking into erp5 right now after having been aware of the project for so long is that my father is starting a company for the manufacture of a certain a kind of airplane parts (a so-called "firewall forward kit" which contains the engine mount, cowling, wiring harness, etc. to interface a new kind of engine to a new kind of airframe). It will not be a big company as it is for a small niche industry. But he asked me about software to use to run his business the other day. I did not have any suggestion other than Quickbooks for his accounting but that does not do all of what he needs. He needs something much more custom. He needs AR, AP, ability to keep track of stock, finished assemblies, parts lists, suppliers, generate PO's and invoices, etc. ERP5 is able to do all of this. -- Tracy R Reed http://copilotconsulting.com 1-877-MY-COPILOT -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
