On Sep 10, 2009, at 11:59 PM, James McGill wrote:
On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 8:51 PM, David E Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
With these questions you are implying issues but not actually
saying what
you are worried about...
What is it that concerns you?
My instincts tell me what I need to know personally, but I am
anticipating questions from the people who drive my project, that's
all. OFBiz isn't something with enough mindshare to build its own
confidence among the suits, and it falls on me to sell it. I know
there are plenty of people using OFBiz successfully, but none of them
quite matches our particular square peg; a specialized type of supply
chain management in aerospace engineering.
Depending on narrowly you define your industry, size of company, type
of products, etc you'll have more or less success finding a similar
company using Apache OFBiz. There are hundreds of companies with
production deployments of it, but there are so many types and sizes of
companies out there. To make things more difficult this isn't
commercial software where a vendor can require users to buy a license
and tell them what they are doing with it... so none of us really
knows a whole lot about what everyone is using the software for aside
from things people share on the mailing lists/etc or things for
clients or others they are working with.
Are you worried about the customization side of things, or the
scaling side of things? Or, perhaps both?
We are finding Product and Order to be a very good starting point,
actually, and we just need to add some industry-specific details to
the inventory process, and we have some work to do because our concept
of "work effort" doesn't quite match what's defined in OFBiz
out-of-the-box. It doesn't seem like a huge job so we are fairly
confident (and wish to give kudos to you and everyone who has worked
to get the application this far!)
We don't even expect to face many "scaling" issues, just basic
concerns about what will happen when we have to deploy in two or three
facilities that might not be able to share a database instance, or
what happens when inventory and order records get really large.
This is different from what people usually talk about when speaking of
scaling. OFBiz does have features that help with running distributed
synchronized systems, mainly through the Entity Sync functionality.
This is used for POS systems where you might have 2-4 (or more!)
levels of servers (ie like POS system, in-store server, regional
server, main central server). This is also used for ecommerce sites,
usually with different sites for different parts of the world and
hosted in data centers in different parts of the world, with customer
and order and other data all flowing to a central server (or server
pool).
One thing to keep in mind with this is that the data propagation is
asynchronous. That means you don't want to rely on it for high
conflict things like inventory checks, unless each server pool takes
care of only inventory in a certain facility/warehouse, or inventory
is handled physically as in a physical store.
Our senior management is understandably risk-averse, since the
situation that leads us to a customized solution is a result of
failure of other solutions to scale to our current needs. It's up to
me to reassure them, but I'm mainly going on instincts and hope and my
own evaluation of the framework.
This can be a tough thing. It is all too common for executives to
evaluate software in terms of how successful the business is that is
selling the software. With community-driven open source software
trying to do that will lead to a great deal of discomfort and
confusion... ;)
As for failure, you can mess up a project based on OFBiz just as
easily as on other systems or on custom software. That's why my big
thing these days (and my big bread winner) is HEMP:
http://www.dejc.com/home/HEMP.html
To increase discomfort and confusion I've decided to make this
material available for free too! ;)
I've probably talked too much under the subject of "Static methods",
since that's not really my concern. I would still very much enjoy
hearing from anyone who has done supply chain and inventory control
work in OFBiz, especially if their model doesn't quite match what
OFBiz's model of "manufacturing."
There are lots of people who do supply chain and inventory control
with OFBiz, mostly in the retail sector, and some including very
complex setups with multiple warehouses, retail stores, multiple web
sites, hundreds of thousands of products and hundreds of suppliers,
and so on. The manufacturing stuff in OFBiz does some of this too, and
that stuff is pretty comprehensive and functional, and mostly sits on
the more general supply chain and inventory control stuff in OFBiz
that is used for many other things.
Best of luck with you evaluation effort... many of the best
deployments happened because someone internally pushed OFBiz as an
option. I know that's true with some of the bigger companies using it
who I've worked with, including British Telecom and United Airlines.
-David
