Having deployed ERPNext in three production environments from April 2014, I believe it’s about time to give a frank and fair assessment of the program.
The first deployment is in a high volument supermarket. The version being run there is 3. Currently, the system has processed over 50,000 invoices (between April 2014 to Jan 9 2014) and still counting. It is very resilient, and easy to use. However, there is a great bottleneck that I’ve no idea how to solve. Submitting invoices takes a very long time, and makes the system unresponsive until it’s done.
What I mean is, when an invoice is created, saved, system then gives an invoice number, now when submitting which is the final step in the invoicing process, the system takes a very long time, so much that everything becomes unresponsive until the submission is complete. I’ve no idea why that is the case, but that is the case. There are times when it doesn’t submit at all. The message printed to the javascript console is about the remote host timing out the connection. I wonder if there’s row shifting when inserting an invoice into the database (?).
Other than the above mentioned problem, the v3 works quite well for the supermarket setup. Except for when saving, it’s very responsive, the POS view is quite great and easy to use, and all in all, a highly recommended product. One thing I want to know is if the upgrade script from 3 to 4 can process the huge volume of invoices I’ve in the system (50,000+).
Now to the manufacturing firm where I’ve my second deployment of ERPNext. That was also initially v3 but upgraded later to v4. Also works quite smoothly and very fluid and responsive. I don’t face the submission/unresponsive issue as highlighted above, even though it’s fair to point out that I’ve less than 3000 invoices in this system as compared to the supermarket.
I’ve a few issues with manufacturing module of this setup which I’ll ask for opinions in a separate thread. But aside from that, this works flawlessly and quite liked by the people that work day to day with it.
The final deployment is in an accounting firm. There’s little to say about this setup because it works just fine and meets all the needs for which it was installed.
I’ve had my fair share of headaches with deployment and setup, as with all other systems. But it is fair to say for the base price of free, I strongly believe and highly recommend ERPNext to anyone that is thinking of using it. Don’t hesitate to give it a try. It’s a very amazing piece of software that looks deceptively simple but is quite capable of handling a lot of situations.