pERP / News: Recent posts

More accurately, automatic purchase order generation, but that's the time consuming part anyway.

This was one of the most requested enhancements in the October 2009 survey. The code has been in SVN for a while, so those who are running off SVN trunk are welcome to set it up and check it out.
http://www.projecterp.org/mediawiki/index.php/Automatic_Ordering
There are two methods available: the simple Min/Max, and a more complicated method that supports lead times and changing demand.

On October 13, 2009 Blue Falls Manufacturing suddenly downsized its IT Department, immediately laying off all employees who were directly working on projectERP. I cannot give the reasoning behind this decision, because I do not know it.

What does this mean for projectERP users? Not much. projectERP works well, and has been successfully implemented by several other companies around the world, and is currently being evaluated by many more. There is already extensive documentation at several levels, and the user documentation covers a lot.... read more

The survey has been completed, and had better response this year than last. Thank you for your responses.
I've made the summary of results available.
http://perp.sourceforge.net/survey_2009.html

Affects MySQL versions 5.1.37-2, 5.1.40-bzr, maybe more

MySQL has a bug that affects projectERP. It prevents the creation of work orders directly, and via Sales Orders, and can cause database errors that require manual repair.

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=47720

If you have been affected by this bug, you will have work order #2147483647. After the bug is fixed, cancel that work order, determine what the next work order number should be, and run this SQL:
ALTER TABLE perp_work_order AUTO_INCREMENT <next work order>... read more

In October last year I ran a little survey among the developers, mostly to play around with a new survey feature on SourceForge.net. I found the results to be very informative, and it really helps to know who is using projectERP.
The results from last year did result in some changes. The #1 requested task was a packaged release, and we got a packaged release candidate out shortly after. Also requested was better documentation. Tom has done literally thousands of edits since. Most recently he's been working on Warranty, Getting Started (for new users) and HR, but almost everything has been updated.... read more

Due to spammers abusing our trac system, I had to disable anonymous submissions. That wasn't a particularly good solution, as there was no registration ability.

Now that SourceForge has Trac available, I've switched over to that. Any sourceforge user can submit tickets, so hopefully that solves all the issues. There is no import, so I've manually copied some of the tickets. If I omitted one you care about, please re-submit it.... read more

John L. Daddow has contributed a fairly complete looking sample chart of accounts. Obviously you will need to tailor it specifically to your business, but for new people just getting started with projectERP, it takes a lot less work to adjust this than create your own from scratch.

You can find the SQL file here:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=166007&package_id=188682&release_id=658830... read more

Finally did up a new release of pERP, 0.4. It's about time. There have been so many changes since the last packaged release, I won't list them all.

This is the second release candidate, the biggest changes from the last RC are a revamping of the build options section, and some changes to bank account reconciliation.
There's been several other bug fixes.

I've made two different packages this time, one that includes just pERP, one with pERP + eGW 1.6.001.

Please test it hard. I don't expect it to be flawless, especially HR & Payroll. I hope for a final release in January. This will be pERP's first Beta release.

After more than a year since the last release, it's past time. I'm doing a release candidate this time, because in the first week somebody finds something that absolutely needs to be fixed.

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=166007
Requires eGW 1.6 RC 3 or better.

Last Friday (2008-08-22) I made some changes to pERP's report system. You can now schedule reports to be generated at a time other than "now". You can schedule your reports to reccur at regular intervals as well.

Due to some underlying technical restrictions (the converter crashes if two people try to get reports at the same time), the ability to generate reports on the fly has been restricted to OpenOffice users. Users who prefer MSOffice or PDF can schedule their reports for As Soon As Possible.... read more

Mike Diehl wrote an article on Linuxjournal.com, "Managing Your Life With eGroupWare" that introduces eGroupWare, and how he uses it to manage life. It's a well written introduction and a good case study. pERP gets a mention in the second to last paragraph.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/managing-your-life-egroupware

The Ajax Select Widget is used all over pERP to allow the user to select one entry from a potentially very large list. You'll see it any time you need to choose a stock item, shipment, invoice, etc. It worked, but not very well.

John Trudel did some work in January to get it going with Internet Exploder.
Raphaël Alla recently submitted a patch to make the tab key select the top entry.
Nudged on by these two, I finally added up and down arrow key support.... read more

John Trudel has joined pERP, and sent changes to the stunning Ajax Select widget for Internet Exploder.

About this time two years ago, we came to the conclusion that reworking webERP's UI as we originally hoped wasn't going to work for us. After several name rejections (bERP, twERP, wyattERP), I started projectERP as a group of applications for eGroupWare. It was registered on SourceForge 2006-05-02, and since the first packaged release in October 2006, has averaged about 200 downloads per month, even though the last release is 4 months old.
After 2 years, pERP has 76,433 Lines of code, at an estimated cost of 19 Person Years, or more than 1 million dollars [ http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3950 ]. These numbers are a little inflated: it only took 2 man years, and I certainly didn't get paid a million. ... read more

Thanks to some extensive debugging with the help of Dean Hampton, you should now be able to invoice ProjectManager projects. It requires some configuration in Accounts Payable first.

If you're using SVN of eGroupWare and pERP, you can see a new tree structure for Bill of Materials. This gives a quick reference to sub-assemblies while editing a BOM. Also, the edit is AJAXified, so you can add all the components you need, then click save.

If you're not on SVN for both, you won't be able to use this until eGroupWare's next release, when they release the tree widget. You can see a screenshot though:
http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=166007&ssid=64246

Making up for the wait for 0.2.3, I've fixed some big bugs reported on the dev list, primarily that the General Ledger transaction listing didn't work. Previously, it only displayed one transaction, and the debit / credit columns may have been swapped.

Another file release. We might be getting close now...
Highlights include:
* With help from Ralf Becker of eGroupWare, a major memory leak when editing Stock Items was plugged.
* XML-RPC access to stock list
* Receiving controlled goods
* Implemented bar codes
* Multiple packages for shipping one item
* Outgoing shipping reports
* Restructured manufacturing, with much help from Regis Leroy,the workflow porter. It now uses Workflow with a build agent in preparation for automatic production status.

Development on pERP has slowed down, but not stopped. What I have been doing is things like reports, and some company specific stuff. Some other priorities have been assigned to all involved, but things should pick up again in the next month or so.
I'm still waiting for testing by people other than me, but here's how things stand from my point of view:

- Our accounting department has yet to go through everything.
- Our Purchasing department is satisfied and eager to start using pERP.
- I think inventory still has a few bugs, but nobody here wants to spend the time to test it.
- I haven't heard anything from Receiving in more than a month, so I'm assuming they're happy
- Orders should work. Again, nobody wants to test it.
- Manufacturing needs a good testing now that it's been converted to use workflow. My testing says its OK, but I haven't tried to break it.

Tom Gray has given some drafts of user documentation. They're pretty good, complete with relevant screen shots and examples where appropriate.
There's one file per section, so you only have to distribute what's needed.

http://www.projecterp.org/mediawiki/index.php/User_Documentation

Any errors, omissions or contributions can go here:
http://www.projecterp.org/mediawiki/index.php/User_Documentation_Errata
Tom will update the docs as required.

Another file release. Highlights include:
* Not backwards compatible.
- More object oriented structure for Orders, Shipments and Invoices. This includes a database restructuring. Common tables and code have been abstracted into the pERP API.
- Lots of bug fixes

Following a tip from Thomas Koch, I've used svn:externals to make an easier way to checkout pERP.
svn co https://perp.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/perp/trunk/aliases/ .
will put the pERP trunk, as well as eGroupWare trunk, into ./default/egroupware/. The extra directories are a limitation of SVN, but this should allow us to have pERP and eGroupWare trunk play nicely in the same directory. A single svn up will update both.... read more

This isn't really news, but it is interesting. I've put pERP into ohloh.net (http://ohloh.net/projects/3950) and it came up with some very interesting tidbits of information.
I should correct that pERP has been under development for 13 months now, not the 3 that Ohloh reports because of some SVN moves.

I've already begun adding the code documentation that is so greatly lacking, only about 8500 lines of documentation to go...

The 0.2 release had some pretty bad bugs, including:
* I forgot to commit some of my reporting code
* I forgot a ; in manufacturing
* Extra indexes causing setup errors
Hopefully all have been fixed now. I'm not sure about the last one though.