Accept random events if you want to live with IT!

In my last article , I had detailed Aicha's consutling invoice layout requirements. From there, I had written a tutorial and made it available to the community on the adempiere wiki.

This document is not complete yet. Do you know why?

Because suddently, after asking some help on the community's forum, I got back to my Adempiere instance and just realised my Postgres service was not working anymore !!

I thought that Postgres and I became friends ! We spent all these hours playing together, joking together and now it decided to let me down. Maybe some command I typed felt like insulting to it! Who knows!

I spent a few hours searching on the the Internet and I read the error Postgres sent back (postgres service does not answer on localhost port 5432) is due to fact that there has been a Windows refresh of the Windows account running Postgres.

Apparently, this is known of Postgres & XP installations. No real solution to recover, we have to reinstall it all. Don't panic, this only happens occasionally apparently for Postgres 8.1 on XP versions.

So, I decided to reinstall Postgres on another windows 2003 server.

From there, I will continue to apply what has been recommanded in here and hopefully complete the Invoice Layout as requested by Mr Fahem. Thanks to reactive Mark & Colin from the forum, I could understand that Adempiere allows to embed a "print format" inside another "print format". The invoice layout is to Adempiere is nothing but a report with a header, a content and a footer.

The content, which details invoice line details can then be designed in another "print format".

We underestand that if we want to add a field "project code", "start date", "end date" in the invoice line of the layout, we will have to go in the "invoice line" print format and add elements in there.

So, I will get an Adempiere instance up & running in a new server and will continue the tutorial.

If I had just started the IT business, I would've turned crazy as of why did Postgres let me down with no justification and just like that. It had blown all my planning and reduced my sleep time.

However, after these years in the IT, I became comprehensive with machines and software.

They have the right for betrayal, they have the right for moaning. The only thing you can do is make sure you don't depend on their humours by backing up systems, mirror important things, ...etc.

Business Case 1: The consultancy Company requirements

I love the idea of this blog. Although I've had 0 comments so far, I still have the feeling of stepping on a stand and telling a story !

Let's continue with the requirements:

Depending on type of business, requirements can be long task. I have even seen a project with more than one year of people writing requirements.

To make the story practical and a tutorial style, I will go through business cases. Each business case is split into a series of requirements. Eeach requirement will have its implementation demonstrated in Adempiere.

As of now, I will start the interview with Aicha Consulting CEO, Mr Fahem. Mr Fahem has a small consulting firm that sells consultancy services here and there.

Mr Fahem is convinced he can make his life easier through an ERP. Let's understand his problems in the first place, section per/section.

How does Aicha Consulting invoices its customers ?

At the end of the interview, I should have a clear idea of what's the input of the invoice, and what's the output of it.

Me: Mr Fahem, can you please briefly describe your customer invoicing process?

Mr Fahem:OK. Quite easy, we have some 20 consultants employed and contracted by our company. These contractors are being assigned to different clients on different assignments. Here is the process:

• On 29th of each month, secretary sends a mail to all consultants to fill in their timesheet by last day of the month;
• The timesheet, which is an Excel sheet contains a line for number of hours for each working day per project, are sent by mail to timesheets@aicha-consulting.com. for each The header of timesheet has name of contractor, name of the client and the address of the site where he is doing the job;
• Secretaries compile these timesheets together and send one consolidated invoice per client. It could be that there are 5 consultants at one client site;
• Client approves the invoice, negociates or rejects some hours, and then eventually figures are being approved by client and so is the invoice;
• Once figures are approved, secretaries send it to the accountant and request 30 days payment terms;
• Client proceeds to payment before expiry of terms of payment;

Me: Can you please show us a sample of your sales invoice?

Mr Fahem: Below is a sample of Aicha Telecom Invoice.

Me: Oh I see, how often does the price / day of the consultant change for a customer?

Mr Fahem: These are 6 months contracts. Prices of consultancy are reviewed at renewal of each contract.

Me: What is deal world for invoicing?

Mr Fahem: If consultants can enter their timesheet online. From there, an invoice draft can be generated from this data, that would be great.

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Let us stop here for requirements. If these are only requirements requested by customer with no strategic vision of what to do of next requirements, we can clearly say that no ERP is required.

Let's see how the exact requirements can be implemented in Adempiere. Next article will describe:

1-) A step-by-step how to adjust invoice in Adempiere to match Aicha Consulting;

2-) A step-by-step solution as to how do consultants fill-in timesheet online (if Adempiere allows this);

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.

The Adempiere Show - Meeting the ERPs and talking to them

In order to find solutions to my problems described in previous post, I have gone out to google to ask what to do.

I have googled, downloaded and evalualted a few ERP:

1-) Compiere:
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Very active community but two problems:

• Oracle database, which requires license.
• The belgian or Algerian chart of accounts, which are of particular interest to me are not on open source. Audaxis the distributor of Compiere in Belgium does not even offer the belgian chart of accounts in its translation version, but the french one. God knows why! As for Algerian chart of accounts, there is no trace of localization there.
• It's developed in JAVA, which I hardly know.
• It seems there is lot of effort to invest to make it work.

The good things are:

• Extensive knowledge base through sourceforge forum;
• Some documents in bits and pieces on red1.org and other blogs;
• Helpful and reactive community;
• Quite mature product. Just don't count on it's web interface, which hardly works.

I have also found some other interesting solutions:

2-) TinyERP

An interesting belgian team is pushing this impressive software developed by pure Open source (Python, PostgreSQL, GTK )

Advantages:

• Looks mature and a serious team eager to make it the best product in the world;
• Seems more adapted to small structures. Modular approach. Only activate modules you're interested in;
• Easy database structure;
• Supports belgian chart of accounts. YESSS !
• Team is available in belgium. Not expensive support;
• Team & project with no doubt lot of future;

Drawbacks:

• No web-based component;
• There is no advanced analytical components in accountancy (version 3.1.3, I heared 4.0.0 wil be better);
• There is no cash flow statement;
• Forum is not very active as in other large open source projects;
• Current forum posts don't answer to issues I have written yet. It seems it needs more time;
• I don't know much about Python;
• No concept of multi-companies (will be supported as of 4.0.0 I heard, check www.tinyerp.com);

So, I have decided to look at next one:

OpenBravo :

The speed of the demo version of the OpenBravo website is impressively fast. I have downloaded it after assesing it was worth downloading.

Advantages:

• Totally web-based;
• Based on Compiere, any effort in Compiere is probably a gain in OpenBravo;

Nice website ==> Company with some means. I had read they raised 6 million Euro for their project;

• Looks more open than Compiere ==> PostgreSQL supported. Migration scripts availabe on the web, ...etc;
• Active enough community: I have posted some messages and got a few answers after few days still not bad;

Drawbacks:

• I didn't really find a particular drawback. It is definitely a software worth investigating;
• I'd probably say, forum is not very wealthy to help me progress with my background. If I had some good JAVA, I'd definitely take it.

OfBiz:

A friend of mine mentioned OfBiz as it is a full web interface, translated into french. Fully customizable. He even says that we can build business modules in hours from it. I never had time to evaluate this, but I'd definitely write something about it on my blog as it comes along.

SQL-LEDGER:

SQL-Ledger is not bad at all. Fully web-based. Very advanced features of putting multiple entities. Pretty fast, easy to download and install.

Advantages:

• Fully web based;
• Quite stable/mature product;
• Has got interesting components around it (POS, palm software synch, ...etc);
• Multi entities;
• There is a distributor of this in Belgium www.think-wize;

Drawbacks:

• No workflow;
• Accountancy is not fully implemented for Belgian localization;
• Developed in Perl, which is not difficult but I don't know;

I'll stop the evaluation experience here. I have evaluated a lot more solutions, among which are commercial software such as www.bobsoftware.com, www.winbooks.be , www.phpcompta.be , www.ciel.be and so on.

CONCLUSION

All this evaluations one to the other is like being single searching for the perfect match. You keep meeting and dating women and you find good and bad things about each of them, which is subjective.

At one point, if you're lucky you will find the woman of your life. Alternately, you will guess this does not exist and you have to make it happen along with time (customization).

My conclusion after all this time learning about ERPs is:

• You don't know what you want yet. Please focus on your requirements and put them in paper;
• You have a heart feeling for Compiere. No objective reason, but feel I want to learn it better and meet its people;
• Compiere is definitely the model out there from which most other applications inspire, if you learn Compiere, you will understand all others;
• My business is definitely not big enough to justify such big time investment. But it's fun and passionate to learn it;

Note: You will note that judgements of these software only applies to my particular case. In specific business case, other solutions maybe alternately better.

Next step then is, DEFINE YOUR REQUIREMENTS. Steven Covey says :

Understand before being understood!

The Adempiere Show - The story

Let me first tell the story so far.

on 02/2006, I firmly decided to invest in a proper software to sort out the catastrophic management of my small business. The situation was getting dramatic:

Accounting:
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Almost 05 months of delay for legal V.A.T quarterly declarations. Why ? Takes lot of work. We don't know which paper is where.

Finances:
-----------
Nobody knows where situation is. No proper analytical accounts held. Why? Takes too long to find and gather the data.

Administration:
-------------------
Freelance secretary is costing a fortune. She receives and handles lot of incoming mails. Lots of reminders of providers we didn't pay 'cause we have'nt been able to process their first mails.

Moreover, she types all invoices with spreedsheets and asks questions about what to bill, who what's his address again? What's his open items balance?

Sales:
-------
Probably good and saving life. Still we sell with loss sometimes, because of dramatic fluctuations between USDs & EURs. With sharp margins, we just cross fingers the deals we're making are still good.

Controls:
-----------
Money coming in, lots of money leaving and bank is calling for overdrafts controles. What's left for us?

And so on, ... I have read somewhere that 70% of bankrupties are managed by engineers. And 80% of sucessful companies are managed by Financials.

I don't know much aboug finances, accounting, administration. I'm an electronics engineer recycled into IT and facing some issues that I don't always undertand. Not even enough to understand th accountant mumbles.

So, I am just hoping that I will find a software that allows me to get all data fixed in one and get rid of all this time wasted searching info here and there.

What do I think of Open Source model?

Good points are:
-------------------

It's free. Commercial software are amazingly expensive, especially if you come from a country where purchase power is not high.

One said once:

I'm glad copyrights did not exists at time we invented the wheel. We'd all be still running on horses today.

Open source gives you freedome to customize software the way you want it.

Drawbacks are:
------------------
Unorganized steering commitees. When you have a problem, throw a message in the ocean of forums and passively wait for some nice person to answer.

It is not always clear which project is mature, which is not has been abandoned, and which one is good.

Document it yourself. Only few projects are clearly documented.

How to take best out of it ?
-------------------------------
In order to identify active projects, check the forums and the frequency of the message exchanges. Alternately, read some reviews on magazines and try to see who's authoring it and are there still there.

Most importantly, you will understand there is a concept. You take, you give. Some open Source software need your help before reaching point you want them to be. A simple note in a forum is already a contribution as it will help thousands of other readers progress better and build next brick.

Why me? Why Adempiere?

Well,
A few years ago, I have been called by an agency for an interesting IT position in the UK.

Agency: Are you available for some interesting IT contracting work for a Telecom operator?
Me: Yes why not. Where is this?
Agency: That's in Newcastle in England. Would that interest you?

So, I agreed on the phone for this position that looked interesting (Integrating Billing application for a large telco operator).

Once arrived to Newcastle from Belgium and started to ask around the directions to my company, nobody knew. Event most helpful gentlemen could not figure out the street on their maps.

The taxi driver goes: I don't know the name of this street this address. Can I see your postcode Sir?

Suddenly the Taxi man announces that Newcastle Under Lyme has nothing to do with Newcastle Upon Tyne (The famous Robin Hood and football teams). Apart from the first name, the address you should go to is in the midlands, not far from Liverpool, Birmigham...

I ended up in a country I don't know and after all these planes, I still had to travel hundreds miles.

I finally ended-up in Newcastle under lyme. This tiny village linked to Stoke on Trend where Robby Williams is apparently from and where the bus driver of early is same person you meet in the pub at evening time, along with people you've met in the only supermarket down the street.

You may wonder, what has this story to do with Adempiere?

I ended up in the Adempiere Open source ERP fever in a similar fashion. The only difference is that the trip was virtual through google!

Welcome, Bienvenu, Marhaba, bienvenidos, Ahlan wa Sahlan!

The Adempiere show !

In the media world, reality show have been a major success. Big Brother here, Fame accademy there, Star Accademy in France captures millions of people's attention.

Yes, we're all curious to what other people do. When I am facing some situation, I always wonder what other people felt or did when they met this circumstances.

In the past months, I have been attempting to setup an ERP for my company. Backwards, then forwards, hesitating, giving up, taking back, decision making are events going along the chain.

At these moments, we want to share this feeling with others and see what they would do in such situation or another.

Anyway, in this Blog, I have decided to tell and share my love story with Open Source ERP.

People say love is a hope. I have been searching this Eldorado, this magic software that will solve all my current problems. This new promised life where, as a company manager, I just have to wake up in morning and press some buttons to make it all work in one go.

I might be wrong, just as we get wrong with lovers. But that's all life ! Live, Learn and pass it on.

Welcome to the Adempiere reality show starting on 09/11/2007 at 01:12 GMT+1 !