ERP5 Open Consortium

Main Goal: Make ERP5 the default choice for Management Software for SME globally.

-Shared Marketing: create an environment where providers of ERP5 solutions can form partnerships to meet ERP5 clients demands.

-Funds Buffer: provide a structure that works as a funds buffer so that members can decide how to distribute the resources according to their own interests and skills.

-Prospectable Partnerships (medium term):

1. Conectiva: major South America Linux distributor (Conectiva Linux) and support service provider. Is interested in include an "brazilian" version of ERP5 (Brazilian Portuguese, accounting and fiscal brazilian legislation). It requires a brazilian company to support Conectiva+ERP5 clients. Status: in execution, Campos Developer had applied to assume this task. Conectiva has to confirm its position officially.
2. DELTA Program: French-Brazilian innovation program, was created to promote the insertion of companies of both countries in global market, through innovative projects and with the help of research institutions. Initially, a project could be submitted by Nexedi (France), CEFET-Campos (Brazil) and some brazilian company. Status: frozen
3. Macaé Technopole: Macaé is the basis for the Campos Oil Basin industry, which produces 90% of the oil consumed in Brazil. The city government supports a technopole strucuture that will support (starting in 2005) technology based SME. On the software side, the plan is to concentrate efforts on Open Source Software. At this point, ERP5 is already selected to be used as a basis for ERP applications development and deployment. We also envision an Application Solution Provider based on ERP5 that will supply enterprise management solutions to to technopole's companies. Status: started, will grow a lot in 2005.

-Advertisement: Consortium site will be the place for ERP5 consultancy companies advertise their services and products, including consulting in general, software development, and support. Status: planning

-Documentation Effort

1. Reference Deployment Process (RDP): based on members experience and theorectical backgroud the Consortium is in charge of developing the RDP that will enable ERP5 implementations in 3 months. This model will incorporate best practices in modeling and programming with ERP5 and also is flexible enough to allow members and clients to adopt it to their specifics needs and managament culture. Status: in execution
2. General Documentation:

-Success Histories; Status: in execution (Coramy implementation)

-Modeling and Programming Examples; Status:planning

-How Tos; Status: in execution

-ERP5 Book. Status: planning

-Practical Development Projects

1. Workflow Modeling GUI: ERP5 prosseses are modeled using state machines, so a GUI tool that can model workflows and generate Zope code can improve a lot productivity and also reliability of customized code. Dia and Kvio are generic drawing tools Python scriptable that can be used to that task. Using XMI to represent UML State Diagrams is a possibility that is being analised, but the shortcomings of UML diagrams in representing state machines must be weighted seriously. Basically this tool must address states, transitions,and roles. Also, security rules and scripts should be assigned to the models also.(short term) Status: in execution
2. Optimization Procedures: production planning requires sometimes optimization procedures to minimize costs and/or improve resources utilization. By now, there are two optimization problems: the Aggregated Planning, seem as a general problem of creating a minimum cost production plan according to resources constraints and a minimum cost purchasing contract selection. The last one is addressed by the Strategic Sourcing component based on Dr. De Carvalho thesis . (long term) Status: in execution (Strategic Sourcing)
3. Sequence (box) Graphic Widget: a graphic tool to represent sequences of data to time. Ex.: Task Planning (Gantt Charts).(short term) Status: in execution (CMFProjMan)
4. PDF Reporting: tool for generating reports in PDF solely based on OSS.(short term) Status: in execution
5. SQL Request Editor: tool to allow end user to do customized queries on the database. Includes wizards (data extractor). (Medium Term) Status: planning
6. Business Templates System: basic templates for main ERP components like e-Commerce, CRM, Planning etc. They can be directly used or customized for specific needs. It should be based on and reflect the Reference Deployment Process. (Medium Term) Status: in execution, almost done
7. ERP5 Generator: with the workflow modeling tool, plus the Business Templates it is a question of modeling to generate a complete new ERP5 instance skeleton and basic code. Programming is required for detailing the modeled procedures. (Medium Term) Status: planning
8. User Definable Constraints: end user tool for defining constraints for processes in ERP5. It will be implemented by attaching special objects to the workflows. (Long Term) Status: planning
9. Form Editor (Formulator Extention): extend Formulator to meet precise ERP5 demands for rapid GUI prototyping. (Long Term) Status: planning
10. Load Balancer: ZEO integrated tool to dinamically balance ERP5 user requests. (Short Term) Status: done
11. Client/Server Formularies: fat (but not so) ERP5 client. (Long Term) Status: planning
12. Point Of Sales: fat (but not so) specific POS ERP5 client. (Long Term) Status: planning

Remarks:

-We understand that Short Term is up to 6 months, Medium Term from 6 to 18 months and Long Term more than 18 months.