Joseph Brower

My company (Nexus) has been working towards moving to an ERP over the last while.  It has been quite a battle, but we’re finally making headway.  The biggest problem that we ran into is that we didn’t really know what we needed.  We were too accustomed to applications telling us what we want rather than the other way around. Since we’ve been going int the direction of systems integration, we’ve realized that we should be the ones in charge of our software and what it does.  That’s where Adempiere comes in.  I could go into the history of Adempiere, but I’ll let you do that.  I’m wanting to talk about how we’re using Adempiere and how we expect it to make a big difference in our businesss operations.

Nexus owns a small chain of computer repiar stores (Computer Medical Center) that provide various services.  We’ve been trying to standardize on the methods we use for repair and such.  It hasn’t been a simple task, but has really been worth it.  We’ve become quite efficient.  Our efficiency only goes so far though.  Without a way to track effectiveness of marketing campaigns and report on projected time used compared to actual time used, we always had issues really gauging how well each location was doing.  Because of those issues, we’ve decided to sponsor a maintanence module for Adempiere.  You will all be seeing some videos of what it is and how you can use it in the next few weeks, but all that I can say is “Wow!”  Working on this project with Fernando has been a great experience.  It has taken longer than we wanted it to, but the wait has been worth it.Training begins this Monday and if all goes well, we’ll be using it fully before the end of the week.  This is really what Adempiere is about:  letting small companies have the power of full ERPs.

I would strongly recommend that any company that is serious about centralizing all of their information and streamlining their business processes to take a look and at least try to learn Adempiere.  It can be difficult to learn, but it is well worth it.  Hopefully the videos I post over the course of the next few months can help more people realize that true ERP isn’t only for  big companies.

As a lot of you know, I really enjoy photography.  After hearing a few times that I should be selling my photos, I’ve decided to do just that.  Right now I’m only offering one size (13 x 19 inches) and haven’t gotten all of my photos up yet.  I’d love to hear any comments that people have.  I’ll be trying to add one or two every few days until I get a sizeable group of photos up, and then I’ll probably rotate out ones that aren’t very popular and try to bring in some other ones.

On a side note, I apologize for being lax on updating the blog this week.  Lots happened and Friday hit me before I even saw it coming.  The release of phpTimeClock that I mentioned earlier is really moving forward nicely.  I hope it can live up to the hype that seems to be growing around it.