After working with ERPNext over the last 6 months I have
learned that it is probably the best erp for SME. The core functionality of the
software covers most uses cases and it is really easy to add new doctypes. In
the past I have used tryton in the past (it a fork of odoo.) It has been a great
system for us but when I say ERPNext I knew it was time to change.
With all of the good the system has there is many places
that I have found it is lacking and many of these issues have been acknowledged
but perhaps not addressed. The guys at frappe are great but as a community I think
we could be doing more.
I think that we could use a project management system that
the community would get behind. Now I have seen Atlassian Confluence recommended
but in my option it doesn’t really fit in the culture of the ERPNext community.
I think that we should look at something like https://taiga.io/.
It features scrum, Kanban, issues, wiki,
tasks, team, and other integrations. Using something like this us as a
community can tackle many of these issue as teams and as induvial relativity quickly.
I also have found many providers have rich GitHub of plugins that they have
developed for ERPNext but I don’t think a majority of the community know about;
let alone an IT manager/ business owner.
The next thing
that we really need to address as a community is omni-channel fulfilment. Now
when I say that we need to make one module that will manage all our items
though a PIM (I loved http://akeneo.com/ for this and I want to write something
like this for ERPNext). We need to be able to integrate with magneto 1 and 2,
Opencart, prestashop, oscommerce, amazon, eBay, etc. I’m sure many people have
great ideas of how we will do this. I am by no part an expert on omni channel
fulfilment but I am highly optioned about it.
I think us as a
community we need to start and develop marketing material that we can share as
service providers. Sales videos that we can have more white labeled to add our
own info; like contact and a logo. I by no means am saying that ERPNext should
be only marketing material. Everything that I write for this will be done in English
but I will be sharing once everything is written. It will be brochure and a
more formal booklet. I don’t know what exists but I think we really need some
step by step onboarding material. I know we have user docs but that is a lot of
information to grasp to start.
I think that we
also need more use cased that we can share with the community. Every industry
is different and will need different module and erp systems can be an unknown
for many business owners.
This is the
roadmap of extensions that my team is going to be working in in the next year.
Integrate into Joomla. I have a customer that will only use it for their
frontend so we are going to have all of the products integrated into vurtuemart
for the ecommerce. We are going to write a joomla component that we will match
the ERPNext site features 1:1. I am hoping to do a majority of this using node.js
so we can port it reality easy to other CMS. They also have marketing.rocket it
is for email automation and that will be integrated into the CRM.
Intergrate into
rocket.chat. This I am not sure the best way to achieve so I would love some
feedback and ideas. I think for the majority it will run standalone but I want
to be able for sales teams to be able to chat with clients and have the record archived
and attached to the customer in the CRM. I want to able to have a bot that we
can use to create quotes directly in rocket.chat. Oauth will be a must for this
integration to bounce back and forth quickly.
I have a chamber
of commerce that is looking to using ERPNext and we are planning on making a
module for a business directory of members and will handle signups.
Contract management.
I am planning in doing this to handle service contract and SLA but we can apply
this to suppliers, customers etc. The first version of this will be a integration with alfresco and will share the
doc between that two parties and will also have a digital signatures attached
to it.
I am also planning on doing a WSO2 integration. They have an
abundant amount of software that can connect to their ESB.
I am also looking at integrating bots for EDI and batch
transactions. (I don’t know much about EDI but one of the developers I work
with does so it you guys have any ideas for this let me know.
I will make this commitment that we will share all of the
code under GPLv3. I want to have a joomla integration out by the end of July
and hopefully everything else will be out by the end of the year.
Another thing that just crossed my mind is and integration
into a helpdesk software that can be in every install that a service provider
or freelance we can solve issues for end users.