Five Killer Trends that Would Redefine Business Apps

Continued from page: 7

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Deploy an ERP in ten minutes

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ERP solutions are notorious in being extremely time consuming when deploying. A standard ERP implementation could take around many months to a year depending on the complexity of the business processes plans to automate. There are generally two areas to be taken care of while deploying an ERP solution: the actual installation of the application; and the business process migration to the system. Both parts require a good amount of planning and time, making the deployment of the whole system a very tedious and lengthy process.

While nothing much can be done about the second part, you can reduce the time taken during the installation and configuration of an ERP app. This will not only save your total deployment time but also give you more time to plan the actual task, business process migration. The software is freely downloadable and follows the Openbravo Public License, which is a derivative of the Mozilla Public License. You're free to try it out in your organization on your own, or contact an Openbravo implementation partner to help you. If you have the necessary inhouse expertise , then you can try it inhouse, else get external support for it. One such vendor is YourIT-Service. You can reach them at “http://yourit-service.com”. Let's now see how to deploy it.

Deploying OpenBravo 2.35
The software is available for both Linux and Windows. You can download its installer directly from the website (www.openbravo.com), or you could even download its virtual appliance that's would then run from either VMware or XEN.

To create a new workflow in OpenBravo, just go to the Application --> Workflow option and fill in the workflow path from the wizard

As we want to deploy an ERP solution in less than ten minutes, we'll go the virtual appliance way. We have also provided the OpenBravo virtual appliance for VMware with this month's PCQXtreme DVD. The system which you will require to run the virtual appliance should have at least 1 GB RAM, 20 GB free hard-disk space and a Pentium D or better processor.

Any OS--Windows XP, 2003 or Linux will work for OpenBravo, as long as you have VMWare Player or Workstation installed on top of that OS. And of course the machine should have a network card (preferably a 1000 Mbps card) connected to the network. For our test, we used a 3.0 GHz dual Xeon processor server with 16 GB RAM and Windows Server 2008 RC0 installed on top of it.

Now, depending on the OS installed on the server, you have to download VMWare player and install it on your machine. We are using VMWare Player and not Workstation as we are using only free and Open Source applications for this ERP deployment. You can download VMware player from www.vmware.com/download/ player/.

Once you have downloaded and installed it, extract the Zip file containing OpenBravo virtual hard disk image. Now run VMware player and select the extracted .vmhd file and start the virtual machine. It will boot on a Linux machine in two to five minutes and you should see a banner, “Welcome to OpenBravo ERP Community Appliance”. Your ERP solution is now fully deployed and ready to use.

Basic usage
The complete usage and customization of an ERP solution is a vast topic and we can't cover it in just two pages.

OpenBravo has seven different modules that let you manage everything from finances to sales, to projects, production, procurement, and your warehouse. Customizing them as per your organization's requirements would not be feasible here, as it would require an ERP consultant, we'll not delve into that. Instead, we'll just tell you how to get started with it, and provide some basic setup and usage tips.

Login to the terminal
Once you have booted your virtual machine with OpenBravo appliance, you might need to log in to the appliance for some basic setups. For this, you have to provide username as 'root' while the password should be blank. Once you login you should change the root password to something stronger, for security reasons. To do so run the 'passwd' command and give a new password for the user 'root.'

Accessing the interface
OpenBravo has a web based interface which you can access from across the network. When you boot the virtual machine with OpenBravo, just below the welcome line it tells you the IP address on which OpenBravo is running and accessible. By default it takes the IP from the DHCP server running in your network.

Once you boot the appliance with VMWare player, you can access the OpenBravo page from any browser over the network

Now, note down the IP address and go to any machine on the same network and open up your favorite browser. Here, provide the IP address and a login page will appear.

Here, provide the username as “OpenBravo” and password as “openbravo”. While providing the username and the password, mind the case as the system is case sensitive. Once you've been authenticated, the main configuration page of OpenBravo will open up.

That's it. Your ERP solution is up. Call an ERP cons- ultant or try customizing it yourself.

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