What is Open ERP?

Along with other well known proprietary ERP software, like Microsoft Dynamics, SAP R/3, SAGE ERP X3, HansaWorld and  more, Open ERP (formerly named Tiny ERP) claims to be one of the most advanced and modular. Besides its growing popularity it is released under the GNU General Public License, which means that end users should pay only for services provided by ERP software integrators, not for the software itself.

Initially developed in Belgium - Europe, OpenERP popularity spreads around the whole world.

Open ERP features.

Open ERP is very complete and extremely modular, with more than 350 available modules.

The development and community efforts are managed through module distribution system known as Launchpad using the repository system Bazaar, however the main modules are available for installation directly from Open ERP user interface.

Multilingual approach in every aspect – user interface and information itself - this allows people work simultaneously with the same installation and on the same information in their native language.

The main features include:

• management accounting,
• financial accounting, 
• inventory management, 
• sales and purchase management, 
• automation of tasks, 
• Human Resource Management, 
• marketing campaigns, 
• help desk,
• IT Resource Management,
• Transport fleet management,
• Recurring Invoice automation
• complete modularity,
• multilingual user interfaces,
• multilingual information oriented design from the very beginning, 
• multiplatform server and clients (Linux, MS Windows, MAC),
• multiple user interfaces (several application clients along with web interface),
• adaptable to the enterprise,

A summary of main Open ERP features is listed in Open ERP maintainers' site www.openerp.com.

It is based on  MVC architecture, with a distributed server, flexible work flows, an object database, a dynamic graphical user interface, an XML-RPC access interface and customizable reports.  A web interface "eTiny" is also available using the Turbogears web framework.

Open ERP has been established as the main free market-changing alternative for enterprise management systems. Until now only two main alternatives existed for systems that manage a company’s information: install a proprietary ERP system, complete but usually overweight, inflexible, and expensive; or develop a solution internally, adapted to current needs but often expensive to develop, not integrated, and incomplete.

The results will be at the top end of what you might expect from any ERP system, let alone an Open Source system. The considerable gains in productivity, efficiency and visibility become apparent only a few months after implementation. And you can gain from the increased operational quality even if you reduce your human resourcing intensity.

Why us?

We started to use this great product in production in  2008. Although Open ERP claims to be the almost complete ERP product, there are lot of specific issues when implementing any ERP systems into real life production and Open ERP is not an exception. The benefit of  Open ERP modularity allows to adopt this particular software to your needs - not your needs for software or the way you work. But at the same time this modularity causes complexity. Here the  so called “integrators” appear on the stage, whether  they are maintainers of Open ERP itself or their partners or other contributors.

We have 10 years of experience as IT outsourcing company. Our company are enforced to seek effective ways to provide a quality service for our customers . This mission almost can not be accomplished without appropriate software. There is a certain proprietary enterprise software available to address that goal in the market, but unfortunately it doesn't meet all the requirements or it is overpriced, designed for enterprise level usage and not affordable for medium and small sized companies like we are.

We have a lot of different services, including IT consulting, IT helpdesk, e-mail, web and VPS hosting etc.

So for us it is a major problem to invoice all of our services in one single bill to a customer. The perfect solution in this situation is Open ERP  providing us the operational base system with ability to develop custom modules for our needs. We have developed the custom modules for management of IT resources and for creation of automatic recurring invoices and we have also developed some other specialized modules for data acquisition from several external systems, like Postfix mailserver MySQL user database for invoicing purposes, Transport fleet management.

All modules are licensed under  GNU General Public License and are free.

We are joining our forces with other OpenERP integrators around the world to adapt this software to local markets; in our case it is Latvia and other Baltic states. We are working on translation of client and server applications, adapting accounting and other modules to our local legislation.