How-To: Setup an ERP with Openbravo

Businesses involve a lot of functions and in any company, large or small, dedicated departments handle the functions assigned to them. This compartmentalization ensures that experts in the respective domain handle things efficiently. But as the company grows there arises a situation when too much time and resources are wasted when each of the departments carry out functions that are redundant.

For example, it is too expensive when both the purchase team and the warehouse management team maintain the same list of products but each in their own format. That may be a tiny part of how Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) can help you avoid redundancies to run an efficient business. Based on the size of the company and requirements, ERP packages are available from a few thousand to millions of dollars. Today we’ll check out how to set up Openbravo, a modern and professionally backed open source ERP that is cost effective to acquire, operate and upgrade.

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Overview

Openbravo is a leading web-based open source ERP, developed and distributed with the aim of improving the efficiency of business by making modern ERP accessible to everyone free of cost. Essential modules like Accounting, Sales & CRM, Procurement, Inventory, Production, and Project & Service Management are integral part of Openbravo.

Apart from the free, open source version, Openbravo offers paid versions for customized installation and support. A cloud based version of the ERP is also available on a monthly subscription basis.

Installation

Installation of Openbravo starts with selecting and downloading the package from their servers. Openbravo offers several releases available of the ERP. The first step is to select the most accurate answer in terms of usage of the ERP appropriate to your needs.

The answer will help Openbravo recommend other evaluation tools (e.g. videos, online demo) in addition to downloading the Community Edition, making your task easier. For the purpose of this review, I chose the user role ie. implement it to run my business.

In the next step, Openbravo asks for your IT proficiency to ascertain how comfortable you will be with the installation. After specifying where the installation will be used, we are asked to select the platform on which Openbravo will be installed.

A total of 13 different platforms are supported and once you complete a simple sign up form, we get the package ideal for your setup. Openbravo offers extensive step by step instructions and a corresponding user manual to help complete the installation.

Modules

Openbravo comes with all the key modules necessary to manage the various aspects of a business. Right from the Point of Sale (PoS) terminals to Warehouse management, key application areas of the business are tightly integrated in Openbravo ERP. To make use of the PoS terminal integration, a separate version of the software is available for download.

Master Data Management

Managing company data like products, components, bills of materials, customers, vendors, employees etc. is a very important and complicated process. At any given time, there is a probability that multiple departments within company need to access the data for various purposes.

Openbravo ERP helps you organize the key company data centrally to facilitate easy flow of information across the board for different company processes. You can create and manage products across multiple categories, sizes and multiple indices. Pricelists, rates, price limits and
specialized rules can also be created.

Payment terms, invoicing schedules, volume sales discounts, sales channel information and more can be handled from this module.

Procurement Management

This module helps you to be on top of your supply chain network. Procurement Management module is tightly integrated with the financial and warehouse management modules. In essence, if you choose to buy raw materials or office furniture, appropriate deductions are made in the financial module and a place is allotted in your warehouse for the same.

Openbravo allows  your suppliers secure role based browser access to your inventory and usage information. Purchases can be planned, purchase orders can be raised and invoiced right from this module.

Warehouse Management

Inventory information from across all your warehouses can be maintained up to date with the Warehouse Management module. Multiple warehouses can be linked and easy management of bins & palettes for handling multiple items (SKUs) is available.

PoS terminals can be integrated directly to this module to ensure that the item is in stock before generating a sales order. Picking methods can be defined (based on stock aging, LIFO, location etc.). Movement of inventory from one warehouse to another warehouse (internal transfer) can also be performed effortlessly.

Project & Service Management

Project & Service Management is ideal for companies involved in the service business or working on projects. With Openbravo, management of estimates, budgets, phases, tasks, expenses and related purchases can be tracked for each individual project. Billable and non billable (internal projects) expenses can be clearly defined and managed from this module.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM functions are integrated into the Sales module which in turn handles quotes, orders and invoices. While not clearly segregated or fully independent, the CRM functions are sufficient for a business that emphasizes on customer retention. Sales module can capture daily sales information from PoS terminals and has tight email integration as well.

Financials & Accounting

Last but not the least is the Financials & Accounting Module. Openbravo supports multiple currencies which is a welcome feature if your monetary transactions are international. On top of other standard features we come to expect from an accounting module, Openbravo supports multi-schema accounting allowing you to account the same transaction to be accounted in different rules, different charts of accounts, in different base currencies and with a different accounting calendar.

Final Thoughts

The Openbravo team should really consider cutting down the number of questions asked before getting hold of the package. Also, there are simply too many packages and platforms to choose from. While this is, for the most part, a good thing, there is a chance that users might get confused as to which virtualization software is the right choice.

Though Openbravo advertises having an integrated CRM solution, it’s not fully featured and is pretty bare bones. So, it would be better to set up a open source CRM like vtiger if your business is heavily dependent on marketing campaigns and heavy data mining of customer information. In a nutshell, Openbravo ensures a consistent and productive end user experience and I highly recommend this for your small or medium business needs.