ERP/CMS for Small Business IT consultants

Serge asks: "In my IT-consultancy-network-engineer job, where I visit several small business customers, I've been looking for some software to extensively manage resources I have on our customers. Currently, the system sucks. We write reports in Microsoft Word, draw network schemes in Visio, export offers to PDF, and so on, and stack it all together on a nice Windows file server in a per customer directory structure. So much for the automation aspect of Information Technology. My ideal app would be accessible online and offline (I travel with my laptop), I would document a log on every network object I work on, I could pull a query on all those logs from one day to give a daily report to the customer, I could input my working hours to bill later on, it would be integrated with our helpdesk software and would manage each customer's to-do list. The sky is the obviously limit. So, what does Slashdot do to fully handle this information ERP issue?"

Comments

Re:Compiere

[itwerx]

Uh, WTF? Compiere doesn't do any of the stuff that was requested!
Granted, the poster shouldn't have used the term "ERP" since that has a very different meaning from a financial perspective (which is appropriate to Compiere).
What they should have said was "asset management" since that what is really what is being described.

Build your own

[abulafia]

I may be a little biased, as my business builds this sort of thing for other companies. But You really have to build this stuff. There are nice tools out there that can serve as building blocks, but what you're really looking for is a business management package, which is going to be as specialized as your business. Automating proposals, ticket tracking, scheduling, billing and network diagramming is just not something that is out there as a pre-existing package.

Another thing to consider is that it is hard to move a company to a business automation system. You have to carefully get everyone lined up, take their concerns into account, watch for potential turf-wars, teach everyone to use if properly, and deploy it without a hitch. Oh, and that's assuming you built the right thing in the first place. Don't underestimate the difficulty of getting this sort of thing right - it is much more than a technical problem.

Groupware?

[cuteseal]

The functions you are asking for are very specific, and it depends on whether you can compromise - i.e. if the client only accepts word documents and visio diagrams, then you're pretty much stuck using those applications.

Have you considered groupware apps?
http://www.phpgroupware.org/
http://www.phprojekt.com/features.php
http://www.opengroupware.org/en/applications/ind ex.html