Being part of Zindell Technologies we chose to develop the entire ERP system our company uses on our own. Given the fact that in 2004, the year in which we started to develop our system, solid open source code ERP systems still weren't available we had no choice but to develop our own ERP system adjusting it to our specific needs. The ERP system we developed includes 9 modules: office, management, development, operation, system, marketing, finance, legal & support. Being aware of our company unique dynamic changing needs we chose the 'Phased Development' methodology with a bit of agile spice. We started with developing the most urgent modules adjusting them to our company needs as we discovered over time and chose to wait with the less urgent ones. In addition, each developed module was developed starting with the more important features. As of today we can testify that we have already completed developing more than 90% of the featured we planned to develop. Starting with developing the 'marketing' module we found ourselves reusing some of the code in many of the other modules and especially the code we developed for the CRM part of our system. Our ERP system runs on Linux CentOS server using the Apache Tomcat JSP & Servlet web container and using MySQL database.
In 2006 we chose to change the nature of our ERP on going developed system and turn it into a web based system developed using Java Servlets & JSP. Working with Java we can testify the change wasn't too difficult. We took the business modules developed for Java SE environment and turned them into Java beans used within Java Server Pages and Java Servlets. Taking one of the more sophisticated operation GUI based module developed in Swing and turning it into an applet wasn't too difficult as well.
The following slides reveal a bit of our ERP system. Many of our ERP system parts are kept discrete for the same reasons other companies don't go so far as we do. Being open source oriented we believe in being transparent and hope the following disclosure serves that purpose.
The following is the entrance screen to our ERP system. Each employee has a username password pair. Each username password pair has access setting defining which parts in each module are accessible using that specific pair.
Once a correct username password was entered the user get to see the main entrance screen of the ERP system.
Each department has its own module composed of smaller ones added over time in accordance with our company evolved needs. Discrete data is covered with gray rectangles.
