Customer Relationship Management

What is an CRM ?
Customer relationship management (CRM). A CRM is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information.
See the wikipedia website for more details : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management


Enterprise Resource Planning

What is an ERP ?
Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) integrate (or attempt to integrate) all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP systems is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules.
See the wikipedia website for more details : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning


Our experiences
We have been installed CRM / ERP for manufacturers and traders companies. Most of the time, they want to increase there productivities by improving there organization (back and front office). We do first an analysis of the procedures to customize the software. This is very helpful to organized and optimized all the business processes. From the manufacturing to the order process it gives a real time vision of the company. Our customers take real benefits with this experience. This consulting part is very useful to prepare the future training materials for the employees also.
We have compared many commercial and open source software’s before we choose Opentaps like starting point. Opentaps comes from the Open For Business project (OFBIZ), a top level projects of the apache foundation. Open source, Opentaps is a complete platform for your enterprise. This is a really active project in many countries, very complete (CRM, manufacturing, accounting, Point of sales, sales…). It provide permanent releases. Opentaps is an alternative to expensive and inflexible commercial ERP solutions that can be use for a small and middle company.
Here are some Key features of opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM :

• A complete suite that deliver a 360-degree view of your business, from customers to orders to inventory to accounting.  opentaps is one application running on one unified data model with over 700 tables, so you'll never have to do messy integration again.
• Compatible all major open source and commercial relational databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL Server.
• Runs on Linux, Unix, and Windows.
• Service-Oriented Architecture for easy interoperability with external or legacy applications.
• Modular and tiered architecture allows for easy modifications or additions.  An add-on application could be unzipped into a directory and start running.
• Synchronize your users' contacts and calendars with their mobile phones or Outlook and Evolution clients using the built-in open source Funambol Data Synchronization server.
• Built-in business intelligence and reporting tools with JasperReports and Pentaho.
• Integrate with PHP and Ruby On Rails applications, including the Joomla content management system or your custom web storefronts, or use the fully-integrated ecommerce store in opentaps.
• Workflow for adapting to unique business processes.