Curious About Compiere?

Savatage

Anyone ever seen or tried this Open Source ERP/CRM?

http://compiere.org/

trifonnt

Hi,

I have done migration from MS Navision to Compiere ERP-CRM.

But since 1 year Compiere has fork Adempiere which at this moment is better product and i would recommend you to try Adempiere.

Adempiere has free migration while Compiere require payment. Adempiere supports Postgre DB and recently added EDI and replication support.

Kind regards,
Trifon

Savatage

Not that I'm ready to switch just yet 8)

Just curious on what is going on over on the other fronts.

ADempiere is an industry strength solution that combines ERP, CRM and SCM support for business processes. As opposed to the so called "World Class" ERP solutions, ADempiere (originally based on Compiere®) was designed for the globalized world. While the current incumbent World Class ERP's had to build layers on top of the core product in order to provide support for multiple languages, currencies, companies, etc., ADempiere had them embedded from the original design.

O:)

trifonnt

Savatage wrote:

Not that I'm ready to switch just yet 8)

Thank you

you could try online demo before fast switch

http://demo-adempiere.idalica.net/ademp ... moLog/demo

Kind regards,
Trifon

JasonC

The thing that's hard to get a handle on with "products" like Compiere is how many people are actually using them. The company has been around since 1999 and today claims its product has been downloaded over 1.2 million times. That's really, really impressive, but ask them questions about customers running in live environments. That's a harder question.

They are very small (like every other open source ERP provider). Last time I was able to find company reports they were about a $1 million company. Their most basic level of support starts at $2,500. Now I'm going to be very generous to Compiere an estimate that they have doubled in size twice sine I last looked at them and now sit at about $4 million in revenues. Let's further assume that all of the company's revenue comes from people buying the self service edition. That will give us the largest estimate for the number of customers. That $4 million divided by $2500 equates to 1,600 customers. If some of them purchased the Standard or Extended editions, the customer number would be lower. If they are buying their database from Compiere, it would be lower.

The net of this is that as little as one tenth of one percent (specifically 0.13%) of the people who download the software are actually up and running it to the point where they need support. Compiere does claim to work with a network of some 100 partners, so maybe they are supporting more live customers, but it doesn't change the math very much (sort of like the way buying a second PowerBall ticket really doesn't increase your odds). It seems like lots of people kick the tires, but do nothing more. You might ask the people at Compiere why a search of their website for the phrases "customer reference" and "case study" comes up empty.

And then of course the project can split. So you might be running code that split of from Compiere and is better in some way. What do you do when the developers fork again?

You say you've migrated a customer from Navision...what can you share about that experience?

Savatage

Maybe Google will gobble them up and start a Google-ERP 8-[

JasonC

Savatage wrote:

Maybe Google will gobble them up and start a Google-ERP 8-[

Possibly, if they can offer it on-demand. If not it would be a departure from everything else they are doing. My guess is Google heads in the accounting/ERP direction, but with an Saas offering, and aimed more at the SMB space to start.

They had a "big announcement" with Salesforce.com a couple of months back. Leading up to the press conference there was much speculation that they would acquire Salesforce.com. It would't be a bad move them them. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?

On the accounting side maybe some small Saas player like Intacct would make sense. I also think a Google-Intuit combination would be interesting. Or maybe they could pick up some point solutions like FreshBooks (www.freshbooks.com) for online invoicing and time tracking.

In any event, I think we should expect Google to become a direct competitor at some point here. Then I suppose I'll have to start feeling guilty for using Google instead of Windows LIVE Search.

Miklos_Hollender

Three years ago a friend and I contemplated the idea of starting a small Compiere partner company because we thought the most important problem with Navision is the licence price (or rather the licence price compared to what the standard features do). We decided to try to do a simple customization in Compiere to see how easy or how hard it is.

Because what the Date Order checkmark does in Navision No. Series is a legal requirement in Hungary for Posted Invoices, we decided to give it a try. How hard can it be? Even if Navision would not have this feature it would be easy to implement as it uses separate No. Series for unposted and posted invoices. And even if it would use the same No. Series it would not be too hard to implement as we could just hack into Codeunit 80 and tell it to use a different No. Series for the posted ones. So we thought this must be easy in Compiere as well.

So we looked at all the logical places in the Compiere code base to see where numbers are allocated. Then we looked at the less logical places. Then we looked at the most insane places - yet we just could not find this code in the business logic layer.

Then we found it - in the Compiere client application, the equivalent of fin.exe: we found it's hardcoded in the client that if the table behind the current form displayed has a field called DocumentNo, pull a number into it. We felt utter disgust, of course.

Then we noticed there is nothing similar to the 1 Item Ledger Entry -> N Value Entry relation in Navision so it would be quite a feat to implement any kind of reasonable way of costing the inventory on actual costs.

Another huge disappointment was how manufacturing consumption and output was handled: in Navision terms, it is as if posting a Production Order would insert entries directly into Item Ledger Entry instead of posting a journal. At this point we realized even if we implement Value Entries we'd have to go through all the whole code base and customize all inventory transactions because there isn't a single interface to inventory movements like Item Journal Line in Navision.

At this point we gave up.

Now it was 3 years ago and maybe now it's been cleaned up, yet, our general impression was that Jorg Janke concentrated on hacking up useful features as quickly as possible instead of designing an architecture where concerns are clearly separated and thus they can be extended or customized.

DenSter

What do you expect? It takes a significant amount of resources to properly design and develop an ERP class system. It may be that you don't agree with a lot of the functionality or some of the design choices, but NAV is the product of almost 20 years of ERP development. That's not something you can just replace.

Miklos_Hollender

And the other important thing is that as NF1.0 it did really very little so they knew they must design it with extension/integration in mind. I wasn't around that time - too busy trying to grok sinus and cosinus in high school - but I'd have a bet that in 1995 f.e. even development trainings might have been completely different, probably they put a lot of emphasis on how to import Item Journal from an external operations/mfg system etc.

NavStudent

Value Entry did not exist until 3.x. So Nav has been changing and adding new thiings as needed.

Unfortunately, they haven't been doing major changes to other areas.
Although costing and item tracking/ jobs is the exception.
Mainly because of all effort has been put on 6.0 release.

Other areas that Nav should look and redesign is. Serial, Lot tracking,reservation,item tracking. MRP.
Better graphical tools to see the effects of change the date of a production order, purchase order, and how it effects the supply chain.

Reimplement dimension, analysis views should be built on OLAP cubes.
Redesign VAT and Sales tax posting process.
Make warehouse management more user friendly. Don't just error, nothing to handle. Display the item and why it's not available.
Redesign ADCS so it’s easier to modify and let serial and lot no functionality.
Build functionality for Pallet tracking in WMS.
Build a basic Ledger for Sales people. So you can see sales and returns for sales people. This will be the cornerstone for commission.
Fix service orders to work with WIP.
Build a warehouse request list form, like Lanham add-on that a warehouse manager can control to create more than 1 like 20 or whatever order he can select and create picks for.
Redesign all Ledgers to automatically increment for scalability. Or Allow Batch Process at night.
Build a scheduler that can run major tasks overnight without solution centers modifying anything.

Alex_Chow

Why don't you create an add-on that addresses all these issues? I'm sure it'll make you millions!

NavStudent

Alex Chow wrote:

Why don't you create an add-on that addresses all these issues? I'm sure it'll make you millions!

If I were a client and bought a db that had modified all these areas, I would be a very stupid client. Maintenance, Upgradability, Hotfixes, Patches, Updates. It'll cost a ton

When you build an addon, you try to minimize modifying the standard objects.

This is MS job and only they can rewrite those major areas. It'll be part of upgrade process.

Alex_Chow

You should check out Cost Control Softwares. They started out enhancing the usability of Navision and they're still alive and kicking.

Every product out there has room for improvement. The people who make the millions are the people that did something about it. Perhaps not you, but someone reading this forum is probably taking your complaints and creating the next million dollar add-on as we speak.

Savatage

oooh, They have a video demo now

http://www.compiere.com/landing/demo-ot ... hanks.html

Miklos_Hollender

If I was looking into Open Source ERP again, it would be http://www.openerp.tv/

It's mind-bogglingly easy and elegant to customize/change...

ara3n

Wow. I'm amazed.

JasonC

Speaking of open source ERP, I'm very surprised to not see discussion on this board about Jesper Balser endorsing the open source ERP model by joining the board of directors of www.openbravo.com.

Jason
www.partnercompete.com

ara3n

They mention to be open, but are Open ERP truly open source?