Open Source ERP – Beyond the First Follower

Hi Everyone,

The below video resembles the adoption of Open Source ERP in mainstream business. Here is my story and others as a first follower.

In 2002, I mistakenly installed Microsoft Great Plains (now Dynamics). It is not that Dynamics is bad, it just did not fit our needs and our situation. The application was too rigid and too expensive to support our model. There had to be a better way. There had to be a different kind of dance than traditional commercial ERP.

In 2003, I joined Jorg Janke in Dallas, TX for a Compiere training class. Jorg is the creator of Compiere, one of the first enterprise quality open source ERP systems. Interestingly, I was one of only two people from the US in the class. The remainer of students were from other countries including Singapore, UK, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and others. As it relates to the video, Jorg was the lone dancing person. He had a simple concept that worked. The Compiere website was ugly. The application was not pretty; however, it just worked – well, most if it worked.

In 2004, I started my first pilot project with Compiere. The question or challenge was could we implement a customized process that met our needs with an off-the-shelf application? We ‘played’ for a while; however, we were still paying for our Dynamics implementation. The pilot simmered.

In 2004, the Openbravo group, in Spain, forked or copied the Compiere application. They made major changes to the web user interface and the invoice/payment process; however, the majority of the core application remains similar. If you know Compiere, you know Openbravo. To this day, Openbravo is downloaded 6 to 1 over Compiere.

In 2006, I started my first ADempiere/Compiere installation. The pain levels of Dynamics had reached a point where we were paying a team of 6 people to perform data entry and errors were mounting. It took two years learn the system, perform the desired customizations, and audit the system from end to end. In 2008, ADempiere/Compiere went live. The world has dynamically changed for the better ever since.

Also in 2006, the ADempiere group forked the Compiere application. The difference between Openbravo, Compiere and ADempiere is that ADempiere has no formal company to support the project. Instead, a band of world-wide integrators continually enhances the system. This group has largely kept pace with its rival projects despite it has no corporate marketing budget. This comment is measured by the ability to support a multi-national, multi-currency manufacturer/distributor with in excess of 800 total users and 300 concurrent users – all supported by ADempiere developers.

Since my fateful encounter with Jorg in 2003, the speed of open source ERP adoption has steadily increased. This metric is represented across many of the open source ERP projects today. The greater the adoption, the greater the contributions and innovation, the greater the adoption.

In 2011, the ADempiere code forked into iDempiere. iDempiere is largely focused on simplifying the maintenance and scalability of ERP. Two of the core ADempiere architects started the project. They are currently planning their first world-wide conference in Germany. If their vision comes true, iDempiere will have the same interoperability and community support as Magento ecommerce. A core differentiator being that ERP is several orders of magnitude more complex than ecommerce in code and in structure.