Seeking Next Gen Online Order Entry Software? 42
kwandar asks: "Our company is a small/medium sized software developer that markets its products around the world. The order/sales system is an outdated DOS-based system, with limited capabilities. We would like to replace this with one that provides new features like: CRM; customer support services; bug reporting; bug tracking; order entry; accounting reporting; and hooks into some form of licensing software. Ideally it would be web based so that all ordering can be done over one system, whether by a customer, our foreign distributors, or ourselves. Have any of my fellow readers been through this and hunted down software, that worked in a software sales environment. Can anyone recommend an all-in-one solution, or several solutions (open source preferred) which can be integrated with minimal effort?"
Advice (Score:2)
Re: Advice, Seconded (Score:1)
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our shipping system and tracking system is done by an Indian dev team, and is the least functional application suite in our entire business (~90K employees).
-nB
Hmmm.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Just an idea... (Score:1)
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Otherwise, and like 80%+ of companies using such system out there, the system ends up hurting more than helping, might as well do things manually.
Re:Just an idea... (Score:5, Informative)
HTH
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At least this level of thinking is geared towards making things easier on the staff - so they can help their customers better.
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Sugar CRM - Open Source CRM (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's a forked version of SugarCRM, by devs who aren't douche bags when it comes to open source procedure.
Oh yes. (Score:2)
Or rather. Once you're into the ERP/CRM space you're talking customisation and consultants... How much are you making just now?
Take a look at opentaps. Sounds the closest free system to your description, but yeah. Much customisation and consultation required.
Link, please. Will opentaps be YOUR funeral? (Score:3, Informative)
Another self-destructive software name by open source authors. Taps: "A signal by bugle or drum sometimes performed as a postlude to a military funeral".
Otherwise, opentaps (all lower case) seems interesting, except that the home page contains many editing errors.
Try Zoovy (Score:2, Interesting)
Pros: Both a
Remote staff can also login to the web interface which is Web 2.0/Ajax to manage orders and do other tasks such as update the website.
Also works with Amazon, GoogleBase, eBay, etc. to increase your visibility
Intractable 'solution' (Score:2)
It sort of goes like this;
Let's aquire online orders via a form - it's easy, into a database and print it out
Oh, let's make it adjust stock levels too, and check to ensure there's enough stock,
How about we tie it in with accounts a bit mor
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If it isn't being adopted by new users then it's being rejected and you're not helping the business.
TinyERP and/or selfmade (Score:3, Interesting)
It's either that with maybe even more solutions added to the mix or you roll your own entirely out of one package. Check out the Zope Application Server (www.zope.org) for that and look the various PHP, Python, Whatnot webframeworks such as django, cakephp, symfony, turbogears, etc.
The last SMB ERP/CRM/Bllling system I built was written as a large extension to a small commercial PHP CMS. If you look into the processes thouroughly and do a clean design it's not that difficult to model a custom ERP around your specific business case. Especially with the possibilities of the modern OSS languages and frameworks it isn't. We're currently building various plattforms and business webapps on top of PHP5 and MySQL5 and with the mostly OSS tools where using (Eclipse, MySQL Desktop Apps, Navicat, Winmerge, Nusphere) and a proper pipeline setup (SVN, local, staging & live systems) I get the growing feeling that practically anything is possible. Don't dissmis the possibilty of building your own system entirely.
Planning and carefull testing of business applications is crucial, but they are not a mistery reserved for SAP.
Links, please. (Score:2)
More open source self-destruction. (Score:1, Flamebait)
Lots of editing errors on the home page. They picked photos of flaky-looking people [tinyerp.com] to represent the product.
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Compiere? (Score:2)
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--Pav
OFBiz (Score:2)
http://ofbiz.apache.org/ [apache.org]
Caveat: it is neither small nor simple, but it is quite powerful, and has a good community of people around it.
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Makes it very easy to try out. I haven't used it.
Customization (Score:2)
Be prepared.
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