First thing: Draft your requirements !

Welcome to the Adempiere reality show,

It is 4:31 AM in the morning of a 08/01/2006. Althought I have an important business meeting at 09:00 AM, just can't sleep.

I just came to finish my ERP integration story. If you're reading this and you hve gone through same phase as me, I hope you will find this useful !

If you've paid a consultant to integrate it for you, it may not be a bad idea. This is time consuming but fun!

Back to my last post, the conclusion of all these ERP dates was that I had first to understand what I want from this software.

Steven Covey , in his 7 habits of effective people speaks about "Understand before being undestood".

I focus right now and in next steps on drafting requirements:

1. Treasury requirements: Problems I face with money in bank accounts and how I think I want to solve them;
2. Financial management: All activites of company are to be modelled per projects, I need to have a clear view on financial situation of each project including non profitable projects.
3. Human Ressource requirement: This part is very messy. I need to know who is assigned on what. How much capacity of resources do we have to run new projects and when a task comes along, who's most available and appropriate to run it.
4. Production requirments: We have two distinct activities in company. One is consulting, which i think is easy to do. Other is trading with telephony traffic, which brings some complexity onboard.
5. Accounting requirements: I should be able to draft a profit &loss account at any moment. Accounting entries must be done at time of entering data ideally, through some workflow.
6. Administrative requirements: Anytime, I must be able to find my documents back, should it come from mail, the sky, the sea or snail mail. Anytime, through keyword, provider, I should be able.
7. Remote access: As I am consulting on my client's side during the day and my colleagues also work from home. Everyone should have access to the system remotely and collaborate without having to smash each other's work

Basically, these are very high level requirements. I will go t hrough each of them individually and take it from there.