Developing a home-brew Open Source ERP

5150fantast, 17 November 2006

5150fantast, 17 November 2006

A really good start to the day yesterday with the third in our company demo series. Kindly hosted by the eOffice on Wine St, people started turning up from 8.15 which caught even me out!

A whole bunch of new folk came along which is great to see, building the entrepreneurial ecosystem is what Open Coffee is all about. Apologies to everyone I didn’t get to say more than a quick hello to I know there’s a great cross-over taking place between Open Coffee and the BEN group on LinkedIn which is fantastic to see – please leave a comment about you and your company if you’d like to.

Lots of new relationships and discussions taking place & it was a shame to break things up a bit to introduce the presentation / discussion topic.

We had a couple presenter’s drop out but that gave Martyn Shiner from Severn Delta a chance to really go through their software development journey. Having engineered a Management BuyOut, Martyn and Clive Birnie (the MD and Positive Churn blog, full story here) were faced with a legacy planning system that was based on Sage. While a good accounting package, it didn’t do what they wanted and since Martyn’s a self-confessed open-source fan the journey for a replacement went firmly down that route.

There wasn’t anything available that did what they wanted, as a small manufacturing business they have more complexity than you can manage on spreadsheets, but not sufficient resource for a full-blown Enterprise Resource Planning system that can cost from £75k upwards. That was just over a year ago, they now have a fully functioning ERP system that they’ve developed themselves. The original Customer Relationship Management project they began working with is developed by a separate company as Tactile-CRM and they’ve now forked the code-base so that the ERP & CRM software projects are individual products (though obviously very complementary as they still share the open-source code base).

Leaving aside the more technical parts of Martyn’s talk, it was great to see their future road map. I say road map, Martyn’s description of SCRUM was to lean over the desk to his in-house developer and say “Dave, wouldn’t it be great if …” or Clive would ask Martyn “Do you think it could do…” and off they’d go!

We touched on hosted instances on Amazon, Android apps on the new HTC Magic, various business models around open source and what sort of businesses would use the system. Through a link with the South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (SW-MAS) they already have their first customer, sort of. Another manufacturing company into motorbike gear sprockets is now using the MRP system, Martyn estimated 1 day from starting with a blank PC, installing Ubuntu, extra bits, the MRP system, configuring, and being ready to receive orders through Web-EDI and raise the first invoice.

Not bad for some home-brew software from an accountant in a textile printing company!

Following Martyn, Martin Coulthard introduced himself and what he’s doing with the Bristol Enterprise Network. Having launched, built an sold a couple of businesses, Martin is taking up the reins on BEN. There have been quite a few changes with BEN recently and the next year promises to be an exciting one with much more focus on enterprise and entrepreneur support & connecting plus the exploration of services to try and make it a self sustaining (and funding) network.

A large part of this is moving the ‘home’ of the network from the Research, Enterprise & Development team within Bristol University to the Science City Bristol as a core delivery for the Bristol & Bath city regions. [Disclosure: From today, 1 July, I am the Manager of Science City Bristol as my part-time 'day job' so it's great to have Martin joining right now.]

Everyone was really keen to continue the networking so we ajourned at that point for more coffee and informal discussions.

Around that time, Sam and the Chinwag folks popped in. They’d been holding their Bristol leg of the Digital Mission tour the day before and had a few more flyers but also some great opportunities for digital companies to go to the US with substantial help from UKTI. All in favour of that! :)

So thanks to everyone for supporting, asking questions and contributing.

We’re back at The Boston Tea Party, Park St [map] on Tues, 14 July from 8.30 for our regular networking, look forward to seeing you all there, then. The next company demo will be around Sept/Oct, I’m just nailing down a date/venue confirmation.

July 1, 2009 | Filed Under opencoffee | 2 Comments 

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