Difference between revisions of "What is ADempiere?"

Revision as of 05:18, 10 July 2010

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Adempiere

ADempiere is a world-class ERP software application designed to support:

• Multiple Organizations within the Enterprise: ADempiere can have multiple branch offices and companies in one single installation, making it especially atractive in large franchises where consolidation of financial and operational data is critical.
• Multiple Languages across the Enterprise and its Customers: All user and customer facing information can be presented in multiple languages. This, along with Multiple Organizations, makes Adempiere especially attractive for exporting companies
• Multiple Accounting Formats: The accounting data can be managed and presented with multiple accounting schemas making the ADempiere application especially suited to the multi-national environment
• Multiple Operating Systems: Having been developed in Java, the applicaiton is able to run on most operating systems

Key Features and Benefits

• Deep Functionality: ADempiere has all the capabilities you'd expect from a world-class ERP:
  • Financial Management - Multiple accounting schemas in multiple currencies, document controlled account processing, full and detailed audit trails, performance analysis and reporting ...
  • Material and Production Management - Products, Bills of Materials, inventory tracking and control, costing, production management, planning ...
  • CRM - Customer and contact data, customer requests, prospect tracking, credit rules,...
  • Projects and service management
  • Business Process Modeling - customizable workflows with strong data and document creation and approval processes that can be molded around customer business processes.
• Community Driven Open Source: ADempiere is a true free open source software project with a strong community of developers and implementers who are actively working to improve the product and its capabilities. Unlike commercial packages, commercial interests are not the driving force - there are no "professional" versions or "premium" pricing models, no proprietary data formats that lock customers into a single solution and no licensing fees with complex rules. The community decides what to include based on the needs of the users. Nothing is hidden. All the functionality, flexibility and power is made available to you without restrictions.
• Growing: ADempiere's core functionality is constantly growing as new capabilities are added.
• Scalable: ADempiere can support small to very large organizations. It can easily grow with your business. If you have big plans, ADempiere is a great choice on which to build your business.
• Extendable: There are many ways that the base ADempiere functionality can be modified and extended. An Application Dictionary provides complete control over tables, windows, processes and reports without any software required. When necessary, callouts and processes can be developed in script languages or in JAVA. New functionality can be added and interfaces with other software systems developed. An OSGi interface that provides modularity is being developed.
• Maintainable: A strong system administration component allows access to all of the applications configuration data and provides mechanisms to maintain the application without having to delve into software or the lower level database. Where necessary, the application comes with all the source code making it easy to identify problems and fix them.
• Database Independence: While not yet fully independent, ADempiere is moving towards full database independence. At the moment, PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL are supported.

What ADempiere lacks and proprietary ERP suites all have

Although there are few differences among the ERP suites when comparing major features, the main difference between ADempiere and its closed source rivals is productization.

Productization means making software work for the general case and making it as easy as possible to use. For a custom program written by an IT department, it might be fine to have all the properties in a XML or txt file. For a commercial product, users expect a graphical administrative interface to help set the parameters. For ADempiere, installation means decompressing the binaries, and then figuring out how to customize it for the production environment. Commercial products generally have installation/deployment programs that do a lot of this automatically as well as helping to create tables, windows and rules.

On the other hand, productization requires a huge amount of work. It can take double or triple the amount of work of one major revision to turn a program into a product. Some "productization" features that are missing or are not developed enough for ADempiere are:

• Administrative interfaces

• Testing features

• Testing on different platforms

• Runtime monitoring through SNMP

• Technical & End-user documentation

• Graphical configuration tools

• APIs

• Web services

By not being productized, the ADempiere application can support a rapid release cycle with quick response on bug fixes, innovative integration with modern software tools and applications, rapid extendibility and customization with business processes.

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