Posts by Rafa Roda Palacios:

Openbravo ERP documentation walkthrough

December 9th, 2009

You watched the introductory video and the customer success stories, you overviewed the product features, the solutions and the services around, you tried the demos… and you liked it! What is the next step? What else can Openbravo do for you?

Openbravo Wiki is the documentation repository around Openbravo ERP: hundreds of articles covering topics such as the installation, the localization and the development of this product. Don’t get lost among this vast number of free resources: these are the key articles that you can not miss.

1. The Functional Documentation will help you to better understand the functional footprint of Openbravo ERP: Procurement, Manufacturing and Sales flows, Financial concepts and Platform related topics such as Modularity or Alerts are some of the topics covered.
2. The Openbravo ERP demo is nice, but you want to have the absolute control over Openbravo ERP installed into your local machine. The Installation Guide details the steps to install Openbravo ERP by yourself, depending on your expertise: Virtual Appliance and Ubuntu installation for beginners and Custom installation for experts (including the installation of the Openbravo ERP environment stack made of the Sun JDK, Apache Ant, Oracle or PostgreSQL databases and Apache Tomcat).
3. Once you installed Openbravo ERP, you would like to know how to use it. The User Manual will tell you the meaning of every single window, tab and field within Openbravo ERP.
4. Now that you have an understanding of your Openbravo ERP installation from an end-user perspective, let’s configure it following the steps of the Configuration Manual: model your enterprise, setup accounting, taxes, roles and users, import your legacy data, etc…
5. Your Openbravo ERP installation is now nicely configured and running smoothly, but you want to get more: let’s develop it! The Developer’s Guide, presented some time ago by Martin Taal, will provide you with theory and examples to take advantage of the Openbravo open source platform. No more excuses not to develop Openbravo ERP extensions and localizations!
6. Doubts and questions? Resolve them contacting other Openbravo ERP users in the Openbravo Communication Channels: free mailing lists, forums and IRC channels open 24/7 to the Openbravo Community.
7. Now that you are an Openbravo ERP expert, would you like to contribute to this open source project and help growing its Community? Take a look at the Contributor’s Guide to discover how you can help other Openbravo ERP users.

Seven must read articles have been presented but there are many others: find them using the built in Mediawiki search engine, the Google Custom search engine or external tools such as Ubiquity, presented by Iván Perdomo some days back.

The topic that you were looking for is incomplete, out of date or does not even exist? Openbravo ERP documentation is evolving and growing daily: you are welcome to provide your feedback, opinions and requests for improvement.

Enjoy Openbravo ERP documentation on-line or download it all with ScrapBook as explained by Galder Romo: c’mon, it’s free!




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Shipments Awaiting Invoice report

November 17th, 2009

Mike is a bit stressed. Sarah, the accountant, just e-mailed him announcing that the company has invoiced 6% less than usual while orders remained stable. Were these orders properly shipped? Mike is 100% sure that last month he shipped the regular quantity of goods. Well, he is the warehouse manager, he is in charge of shipping what customers order, but how can he know if these shipments have been properly invoiced? “Actually, that’s not my job.”, he thinks. Sarah thinks exactly the same; she ensures that customers are invoiced but doesn’t have a clue which goods have been shipped or how.

Do they perhaps need a report that identifies the shipments not yet invoiced? How lucky they are: Openbravo ERP has a Shipment Awaiting Invoice report module.

Functionality

Shipments Awaiting Invoice report aims to answer the following business question: if we are receiving a regular quantity of orders for regular amounts, why are we collecting less money?

• Is there a problem with the shipments?
• Or are the goods correctly shipped, but these shipments are not properly invoiced?

Grouped by business partners and shipments, the Shipments Awaiting Invoice report will display in HTML or PDF format:

• The shipment line product,
• the ordered quantity,
• the shipped quantity,
• the quantity invoiced
• and the pending amount to be invoiced (as the pending quantity to be invoiced multiplied by the product price).



This data can be filtered by:

• Shipment date
• Business partner
• Order document number (the complete or partial sales order document number in our Openbravo ERP system).
• Shipment document number (the complete or partial goods shipment document number in our Openbravo ERP system).
• Delivery terms
• Form of Payment
• Payment Terms
• Organization



Technical design

Packaged in a module, this report is made of a manual filter window and a Jasper Report template.

This simple development was tackled component by component:

1. Definition of the module,
2. development of the Application Dictionary components,
3. development of the filter and report user interfaces,
4. development of the database query
5. and development of the controller servlet.

You can find the technical documentation in the project’s Forge and the code versioned and publicly available in the Openbravo source code repositories.

Extension

Sarah and Mike do not really need all the filter fields:

• Sarah does not need to know about Shipments Document No. or Delivery Terms filter fields
• and Mike does not want to be confused by Form of Payment or Payment Terms.

In order to achieve these functional requirements:

• Two new reports will extend the original Shipments Awaiting Invoice report. We will call them, for instance, Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Accountants and Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Warehouse Managers.
• Accountant and Warehouse Manager roles will be granted access to the Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Accountants report and to the Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Warehouse Managers report respectively.
• The filter window of the Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Accountants report will hide Shipments Document No. and Delivery Terms filter fields.
• The filter window of the Shipments Awaiting Invoice for Warehouse Managers report will hide Form of Payment and Payment Terms filter fields.

Summary

Based on some business needs, we went through the functional and technical documentation of a simple report module, pointing to the relevant sections to develop it and presenting its extension possibilities.

Feel free to download and install the Shipments Awaiting Invoice report module. You are welcome to provide feedback in the project’s forum and log issues and feature requests in the issue tracker.

Mike and Sarah are now in a better mood: once the shipments that were not invoiced were identified, they could take action on them and the company is again following its regular income path.




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Orders Awaiting Delivery report

November 16th, 2009

Ring, ring, …
- “Hello?”
- “Hi Matt, it’s Tim.”
- “Hi Tim, how’s the family?”
- “Well, but what about the status of my order 89276523D?”
- “Uhmmm…, wait a second please.”
- “Sure.”
15 minutes later…
- “Tim? Are you still there?”
- “Yes! I am!”
- “OK, so I talked to the warehouse guy and he told me that there has been an inventory shortage. So I talked to the production guy and he told me that he did not receive the raw materials. Then I talked to the purchase guy and …”
- “Don’t tell me stories Matt… My components haven’t been shipped yet, right?”
- “No, Sir…”
- “Grrrr! Bye!”
- “Is this a definitive goodbye?”
Tu, tu, tu, …

Did you find it funny? Tim, the customer, did not… neither did Matt, the sales representative. Poor Matt, how easy would his life be if he could know, right away, the shipping status of any sales order. And how much easier if customers could directly check the status of their orders by themselves, without having to phone him. Fortunately, Openbravo ERP is here and the Orders Awaiting Delivery report module is what Matt needs.

Functionality

Orders Awaiting Delivery report aims to provide a meaningful piece of information to sales representatives and managers:

• What is the status of this sales order?
• Have all the order lines’ products been shipped yet or not?
• If not, do we have enough stock to proceed with the shipment?

And this information can afterwards lead to more questions:

• If there was enough stock, why have the order lines’ products not been shipped yet? Is there any problem with our shipping company?
• If there was no stock, why are we in inventory shortage? Problems in our production chain or problems with our suppliers?

Grouped by business partners and orders, the Orders Awaiting Delivery report will display in HTML or PDF format:

• The order line product,
• the ordered quantity,
• the pending quantity to be shipped (as the ordered quantity minus the already shipped quantity)
• and the quantity available in stock.



This data can be filtered by:

• Order date
• Business partner
• Delivery terms
• Order document number (the complete or partial sales order document number in our Openbravo ERP system).
• Order reference (the complete or partial purchase order document number in the customer’s information system).
• Organization



Technical design

Packaged in a module, this report is made of a manual filter window and a Jasper Report template.

The 3 steps of this simple development were:

1. The definition of the module,
2. the development of the filter window
3. and the design of the report template.

You can find the technical documentation in the project’s Forge and the code versioned and publicly available in the Openbravo source code repositories.

Extension

This report may not fill all Matt’s needs, so let’s extend it.

From a functional side, Matt wants:

• That customers can directly access Orders Awaiting Delivery report in his Openbravo ERP system, so they do not have to call him for the information.
• The customers have only access to their orders, avoiding that they see others’ data.

In order to achieve these functional requirements:

• A new report will extend the original Orders Awaiting Delivery report. We will call it, for instance, Orders Awaiting Delivery for Customers.
• A new role will be created, having only access to the new Orders Awaiting Delivery for Customers report.
• A new user will be created. This user is associated to a business partner.
• The filter window for the Orders Awaiting Delivery for Customers report will only display order date, order document number and order reference filter fields.
• Business partner filter field will not be displayed but will be defaulted. The default value will be the associated business partner of the logged user.

Summary

Based on some business needs, we went through the functional and technical documentation of a simple report module, pointing to the relevant sections to develop it and presenting its extension possibilities.

Feel free to download and install the Orders Awaiting Delivery report module. You are welcome to provide feedback in the project’s forum and log issues and feature requests in the issue tracker.

Ring, ring, …
- “Hello?”
- “Hi Matt, it’s Tim.”
- “Oh, Tim, it’s been a long time… Did you receive the components?”
- “Yes, I did. No problem. How’s the family?”
- “Uhmmm… Well, thanks.”
- “I’m just phoning you to tell you that your Orders Awaiting Delivery for Customers report just rocks.”
- “I’m glad to hear that.”
- “Bye! Take care!”
- “You too, bye!”




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