Idempiere, the Open Source Erp with OSGI technology

The Software Open Source grows rapidly, creating free alternatives to proprietary software that in previous times dominated all commercial and personal areas, one of the areas where the Open Source has been more successful is in the Business Area where free applications every day offer better solutions. Idempier is one of these applications, which thanks to the community has come to strengthen a very important area such as Resource Planning, allowing the integration of the various processes of a company in an efficient and scalable way.

Idempiere is nothing but a Security of Business Resource Management (of English ERP Enterprise Resource Planning), which also has at its core a  Customer Relationship Manager (of English CRM Customer Relationship Management), accompanied by a Supply Chain Manager (of English SCM Supply Chain Management). Idempiere is based on the also Open Source ERP adempiere differing from this in the inclusion of technology SOGI that allows the structuring of plug-ins making it a fully ERP scalable, modular and independent.

The enterprise resource planning system solutions market is led by the use of with high-cost licenses, and there are few Open Source alternatives to support them. However, Idempiere represents an interesting option, with great expansion opportunities because it is standards-based and developed on the programming platform Java platform,Enterprise Edition (J2EE, also translated as Enterprise Java) in addition to being independent on the database and enjoy the ability to connect to multiple databases. Similarly, it presents a continuous and active development that has allowed it to mature as a product of .

 

Idempiere allows us to have:

• Multiple Companies (business groups)
• Multiple organizations (headquarters, companies)
• Multiple languages
• Multiple currencies
• Multiple accounting schemes
• Multi-user

What makes Idempiere special is its adaptability any business model and established standards, thus increasing productivity, reducing integration errors and attacking the diverse needs of a company in a single tool.

Idempiere has a role for parameterization and configuration in addition to various roles for the functional area, its core it is divided into twelve large groups: System Administration, Application Dictionary, Relationship with Third Parties, Sales, Purchases, Returns, Outstanding Balances, Materials Management, Project Management, Performance Analysis, Assets, Manufacturing.

Structurally native Idempiere contemplates a workflow that can be divided into six areas: Requisition to Invoice, Quote to Collection, Treasury, Inventory, Human Talent, which directly affect Accounting.

In the same way Idempiere can be extended thanks to the plugins that use the OSGI technology, there are currently 52 plugins in the official repositories that extend the basic functionalities of Idempiere, among which are:

• Integration with other platforms such as Asterisk, Google Map, JasperReport among Others.
• Adaptation to mobile platforms and applications made in Native Android.
• Locations in Various Countries (They adapt the Erp to the regulations of each country)
• POS clients for the Sales Area.
• Integration with scanner, devices, sensors.
• Numerous themes to improve or adapt the interface.
• New Modules for Payroll, Human Resources, Withholdings among others.

Many of the official plugins too allow to extend core functionalities of Idempiere, such as Warehouse management, manufacturing management, csv import, asset maintenance, payment method among others. In addition to that, the community makes plugins that are distributed in various ways. Both the Erp and the plugins are distributed under the GPLv2 license, which allows its users to make use of all its functionalities.

Idempiere is distributed under two clients:

The web version which is the most widespread and which is created under the ZK framework which allows a complete user interface without using JavaScript and using high-level java language. The ZK framework allows various changes to be made to the ERP interface using design templates, which is why many users of the community have taken on the task of creating various skins for ERP stop this way adapt it to each user and give it the look they want.

The Desktop Version which is made under the Swing Java graphical library, said client is little used and is used in those companies where fewer access controls are desired, it is also usually used in those cases where the web server cannot withstand the concurrence of the desired users, because desktop client loads objects at pc / client level. The Swing version is widely used in the development environment and its distribution within users in the production environment is unitary.

Idempiere has grown in an accelerated and organized way no doubt thanks to the Osgi technology that has allowed it to be a Fully modular ERP, which makes it possible to replace one ERP module with another without affecting the rest of the modules. This has brought many benefits where they stand out:

• Ease of Changes
• Fast compression of functionalities.
• Parallel development.
• Ease of testing.
• Code reuse.
• Simplification of projects with many developers on different teams.
• Management of both local and remote deployments.
• It has made it an easily expandable tool.

We can try Idempiere for free and in a matter of minutes accessing the community demo at https://test.idempiere.org/ with the following access data.

• E-mail: admin@gardenworld.com(Include the spaces!) Password: GardenAdmin
• E-mail: superuser@idempiere.comOR system@idempiere.com (Includes spaces) Password: System

Developers can get the source code by Idempiere on SourceForge, there are various manuals, video tutorials, tools and pieces of code for teaching development in Idempiere, in the same way the Idempiere community has been given the task of creating an official documentation in the Idempiere Official Wiki.

 

The Future of Idempiere is very encouraging, the growth of the community has been quite large, the integration with other tools has allowed solutions to almost any problem raised, the inclusion of Osgi in the core of its platform has opened the interest of large companies sponsoring large-scale projects and above all the successes of its predecessors Fulfill y adempiere allow you to have the confidence of having in production environments of an ERP capable of processing large amounts of data and above all attack which process of an organization. Idempiere is undoubtedly one of the great promises of Free Software and its use in small, medium and large industries opens the door to tool excellence.