5 Open Source ERP Solutions For Your Small-Medium Business

To support innovation and growth, many small and medium companies are turning to enterprise software solutions to help them improve customer visibility, streamline operational activities and increase commercial transparency inside their organization.

Enterprise Resource Planning is a software product that supports end-to-end daily commercial activities. For large enterprises, implementing this type of software is a long (several years) and costly (several millions of dollars, yearly!) effort.

For a small-medium business that should not be the case. Open source ERP software provide a wealth of functionality to support core business processes, easy to use user interface and best of all, it's free! You (or your outsourcing IT partner) can download the software for free and setup it up within a day to get your business running!

Open source ERP software also offer extensive documentation, communities that are all about sharing knowledge and experience and simple techniques that let you customize the software to fit your needs.

There are literally hundreds of open source ERP projects, but the 5 solutions you really need to know about are:

1.Compiere - With more than a million downloads, Compiere is today's most established open source ERP solution. With a strong partner network to help you in your ERP implementation project, Compiere can get you to the next level of efficiency. Compiere supports accounting, warehouse management, Point Of Sales, E-commerce and project management.

2.Openbravo - A powerful open source ERP solution, Openbravo offers a vibrant community around its product, large partner network, especially in Europe, and a modern, flashy user interface. It is also one of few open source ERP solutions that offer manufacturing module as an integral part of its product. Openbravo also offers accounting, sales, warehouse management and Point Of Sale.

3.Opentaps - Build on top of the robust Apache OFBiz foundation, Opentaps provides CRM, Point Of Sale, Accounting ,warehouse management and an on-line store. It is still in relatively early stages of development but already offers great value and has a bright future ahead of it.

4.Adempire - A spin-off project from Compiere, the Adempiere team is set to take Compiere to new heights. It's a separate offering from Compiere, which offers, on top of Compiere's functionality, a manufacturing module and a free web-based user interface.

5.Postbooks - focusing mainly on accounting, Postbooks is the open source brother project of OpenMFG, a powerful manufacturing-oriented software solution. Other than accounting, Postbooks provides CRM, warehouse management and a purchasing module.