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Open Source for Enterprise Management?
acooks asks: "After a recent talk on Open Source software to a class of MBA students, someone came to me with a huge opportunity to use Open Source to manage business processes. What they want is SAP, but for small to medium sized businesses and at a price that a small business can actually afford. Furthermore, they realised that Open Source isn't going to go away anytime soon and that they might as well try to use it to save costs (If IBM is embracing Linux and SAP & IBM plays nicely, then maybe it's worth finding out more about Linux). The questions that were raised basically boils down to this: Is there Open Source software available to manage a business or some of the business processes? Where do you start looking for something like this? I realised that this isn't something that you can quickly download from SourceForge or Freshmeat, so now I'm asking Slashdot."
It's a work in progress, but it's there (link)
http://www.compiere.org/
"the most popular Open Source business application - usually among the top 10 of the 60,000+ projects in SourceForge"
I looked at it a couple years ago for a grad school project, and the documentation was limited. However, now the technical docs look solid, and there's classroom and on-line user training.
Thanks a lot, big brain. (K. Vonnegut, "Galapagos")
http://www.compiere.org/
http://www.gnue.org/
Also check the Kernel Cousin for information:
http://kt.zork.net/GNUe/index.html
Every business has special needs. See the recent discussion right here just a few days ago.
Compiere and SQL Ledger sound promising, though.
My son's 5th grade teacher actually assigned them "write a limerick about a planet". I'm not kidding.
Not sure if it does everything the poster is looking for. It's more of a financials package (ERP and CRM), but it is targeted at the small to medium business environment the poster asked about. http://www.compiere.org/.
I personally think only the largest businesses are going to use an all-encompassing customizable framework to base all of their business apps on. Most will use pieces that do one thing well and integrate them. All in one types like SAP let things play together nicely but you duplicate effort that might have been done in a more targeted package, assuming no one wrote a SAP module that does this.
Just my $.02
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Look at http://www.millnet.se/product_milltime.html
and http://www.millnet.se/product_millbill.html
The software can run on Linux and is inexpensive.
The web is only swedish but the software also support english.
If you are asking what Customer Relationship Management/Enterprise Resource Planning(CRM/ERP) apps can run on Linux then there is good news. First off there is SAP. There is also Oracle and probably a few others as well, I'm not sure about Seibel.
The bad news is that these applications are prohibitively expensive for Small to Medium Enterprises(SMEs). This becomes a greater problem with the fact that your desire for the application to be Open Source implies that you would prefer free software(wouldn't we all?).
There are a few Open Source projects that have been started to address this need but, they are very small and unlikely to be really helpful or useful in the near future. CRM/ERP apps are huge cantancerous beasts that require a tremendous amount of development effort. In fact, I'm not sure that development will ever end for this type of software.
Now, the really bad news is that our good friends at Microsoft have also seen an opportunity for CRM/ERP in the SME area and are making an effort to fill that void. Recent acquisitions including Great Plains, Solomon and Axapta show that they are aggressively moving into this market and the already have a product available.
This new M$ offering will certainly not be free, nor will it be cheap. But, it will be feature rich, powerful and just barely affordable to the SME market. Which all means, further lock-in to the borg.
The slashdot crowd might not want to hear it, but not every task is suited to OpenSource. Most open source projects are technical in nature, because the people who work on them are techies. No news here.
There are a number of afforable (< $50 a head a month) online service providers for this stuff. I used to work for one. It is hard to compete with a product that has dozens of man years of engineering time honed by hundred of man years of use and feedback.
There is some hope that an open source alternative will eventually match the commercial offerings. Many opensource projects just copy features found in closed source products. It takes a long time before the free versions out last and out innovate their monied competition.
My recomendation to small businesses is pay for one of the existing products, they are good.
If enough free software folk scratch their itch there will be an open source product worthy of use. But as Linus has said of using bitkeeper vs cvs, it is stupid to hamstring yourself by using an inferior product merely for ideological reasons. Of course, only the end user can decide if it will benefit your business more to use a for-pay versus open source project. And don't forget to check freshmeat every once in a while to see if the balance has changed.
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
Instead of trying to find magical software, why not hire a really good management staff and reward them appropriately? I'd bet the cost is actually lower and doesn't reek of proprietary lock-in, five-year upgrade cycles, added technical support staff, and perpetual confusion over what the system is actually supposed to do.
.NET/J2EE (think of the children!).
I say proprietary lock-in above, because I think the ability of an Open Source project to organize and capture proprietary business processes is debatable. Open Source tends to have an outside perspective with respect to commercial business.
And, seriously, what "small to medium business" business processes can't be handed by e-mail and simple internal websites. This can even be done without Oracle (the horror!) or
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
You have vendors, right? You really do have money and are trying to buy something, right? Find out from people who know and who might actually have something to offer, like Red Hat and IBM.
If the vendors don't already have such products (and I bet they do), if you voice interest they will be more likely to develop them. For example, Red Hat is selling a separate database package based on Postgres. Certainly, they'll want to sell database applications, too (like ERP). At the very least, they'll direct you to partners of theirs who are developing such things. Just let them know you're interested.
There was a GNU project that did that, but I think if you know the workings of your company you can easily run a postgresql database and serve business off it. Reporting tools like crystal reports work well with it being an SQL database, and you can use QT on linux to make simple interfaces for most anything.
Be sure to document everything as you go and restrict permissions for every user, if you go ahead with this, and consider releasing it opensource.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I've worked at a couple of mid-sized companies that use JDE and I've had no complaints. The older version of the software is in RPG, the newer versions use (I think) C++ or a proprietary language that's pretty easy to get into. Since all the source is there it's easy to make mods and recompile what you need, and there's a pretty big community of friendly users if you have any questions.
What's that? You meant free software instead of open source? Well, I can't help you there...
The idea of 'enterprise' systems is rather vague in general. It means different things to different people..
First define EXACTLY what you need, then look at what's available with a *little* bit of looking..
(compiere, sql-ledger, gnuenterprise, nola.. ).
You will find none do what you need, so plan on having someone dedicated for a while to coding the missing component..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unlike Compiere, doesn't require Oracle.
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