Hi David, Thanks for the technical feedback on workday. What I was more intrigued by them was not the internal architecture but the way they took the approach for building a system from business process perspective and able to answer when, where, how and why of a particular transaction and have a nice integrated UI on top which very well serve the regulatory requirement as well.
In general since I am more into supporting direct business and apply technology for achieving business objective, the approach made a perfect sense to me, and if you see the article the Finance comes automatically in the end. They were not trying to build a Finance system and then slap supporting systems around. This is what I was trying to emphasize on ofbiz that it can do the same since it's not trying to be Finance system and then put other parts in place. I have seen other open source alternative like Compiere, Adempiere (offshoot of Compiere), Postbooks, OpenBravo (the data model borrowed from Compiere, which in turn inspired by SAP), TinyERP they all are built around Finance and then supporting process built around Financial Management. Indeed Oracle and SAP works the same way although they try to cater to multiple industries and in trying to be generic they are really very heavy. This is for some good reason as well since the heaviest users for ERP are mostly financial staffs (which are forced to use a system due to regulatory and statutory requirements). The company is compelled to invest money in these system because it's forced and then if the same vendor offers a better business management suite along with Finance it's an easy sale. Recently I was reading Mcluhan theory of Laws of Media which opened my eyes on to how innovation works. It's altogether a different way of looking at business. I find workday was trying to do the same taking up a different approach. Ofbiz is still work in progress it's there and not there yet I envision ofbiz as a single integrated development framework for building Unified Business Applications (means you have single framework handling your core business). Then it becomes easy to manage such system with homogenous team which can rotate across or homogenous infrastructure team which can rotate across. I saw the same thing about ofbiz in my company and did some presentation of which some parts I can share with the community later. But you know when I wanted to sale the product the only drawback came was the UI although it made perfect sense to me but to other users it seems very complicated as you know sometimes first impression is the last impression it would be nice if the OOTB applications are made a little appealing. Anyways this was a very long post and I can write a lot about it since I really tried selling this concept against SAP, Oracle Netsuite and other open source offerings. In one case I was successful as well and its work in progress. Thanks With best regards, Vikrant -----Original Message----- From: David E Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 2:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Workday Out of curiosity I looked into Workday a little more. It sounds like they are using a VERY object-oriented architecture, so much so that they only have 3 database tables and map all objects to them in an automated way. This may seem really nice from a development perspective, but I've been through a few of these systems and they are a bit of a nightmare. When you get into millions of records and query on more than one field/ column you end up joining on the same table, etc, etc. My worst experience with this was part of a project to migrate of off such a system, namely the now mostly defunct Blue Martini which did persistence in a very similar way. Fortunately I've never done significant development or support on such a system. The queries to pull data from the database were massive and required about 3 man- months of effort to complete the migration of product, customer, and order information to the OFBiz database. The normal effort for that sort of thing is generally around 2-3 weeks for complex mid-high end systems, or for simple data (like basic product information spreadsheets) the time required can get down to a couple of hours. It's amazing to me how many systems still try to do things this way. IMO OFBiz has about the right number of tables and columns in the database, ie 758 tables and 7817 columns. The tables in general represent a nice level of conceptual granularity and are adaptable to many variations on the supported concepts. When looking at a database for an enterprise system I get really scared by 2 major trends: 1. a really small number of tables, like 3, where everything is in the object model 2. a really large number of tables and columns, like Oracle Financials ~2 million columns, where things are excessively denormalized, redundant and in general just chaotic -David On Jan 15, 2008, at 7:26 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote: > HI David, > > Further to this would suggest following article they are good: > http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=5983#more-5983 > http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=128 > > Thanks > With best regards, > Vikrant > > -----Original Message----- > From: David E Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 3:10 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Workday > > > I would be really interested in hearing more from Vikrant about what > he likes about Workday. If you're listening in Vikrant, please do > write more about what parts of the Workday approach you like. > > For my part I have looked into it a little bit and I think their > approach is great. More specifically what I like is the idea of > creating a software suite for a particular type of business that > basically does everything that such a business would need. Doing just > this sort of thing as a derivative work based on OFBiz has been part > of the long-term strategy from the beginning. > > The accounting piece would benefit from this, but in a way that is > similar to how all other parts would benefit. That benefit is reducing > redundant data and tying things together directly that might otherwise > be in different systems. For accounting this is great because you > don't need to introduce so many artificial structures to take partial > data from other systems that is needed for operations or reporting, > especially ad-hoc reporting when creating a data warehouse to > consolidate data from multiple systems is not really a tenable > approach. The "cost centers" thread that was active recently is a good > example of partially redundant data that is necessary because of > separate systems and a light integration between them. > > I don't know if that is what Vikrant liked about Workday, but that is > something that struck me as I was reviewing the public material > available. > > -David > > > On Jan 11, 2008, at 2:59 AM, Jacques Le Roux wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> I recently had an exchange with Vikrant Rathore about new accounting >> efforts. I think it is worth to be reported, here it is >> >> Vikrant : Have a look at http://www.workday.com/ I would prefer to >> implement finance in their way not the traditional ERP way. >> >> Me : What is so specific in their offer apart it's an ASP ? >> >> Hi Jacques, >> >> In financial component they combined 5 major parts of Finance: >> 1. GL Management (ofbiz is still working on to implement it) >> 2. Reporting (both statutory and financial management related) >> 3. Auditing >> 4. Budgeting and tracking. >> 5. Asset Management. >> >> Normally none of the Financial Management system itself comes close >> to it. As you have to buy separate software to do it. Besides this >> the way they presented the whole solution is more business oriented >> then technical jargon oriented which is what most ERP's do. >> >> So I feel there way of doing Financial Management linked to all the >> other parts of business is a good implementation. You do not need a >> separate budgeting, asset management, reporting and auditing >> requirements (for SOX compliance). Everything comes out of the box. >> I haven't seen such a offering either by SAP business byDesign or >> Netsuite and I guess ofbiz can do it since it's a single data model >> but no component is there to address it. >> >> Regards, >> Vikrant >
