ERP5 implementation experience. Łukasz Story

Raskon company joined to ERP5 community in the beginning of 2008. That time there were only two people in community who were not working in Nexedi - Bartek Górny and Łukasz Nowak. They are Polish and they helped us a lot. They have successful experience of ERP5 "external" implementation which Lukas described in ​erp5-users mailing list.

For newbies his story is instructive but consists of 2 pages so this is it in brief.

In 2006 Lukas was hired by Ventis to implement open source ERP. After "dramatic battle" ERP5 win over other open source ERPs. Lukas promised to implement ERP5 in 6 months. That time there was no packages or buildout, so Lukas used live CD for installation. As follows from his description he was neither acquainted with ERP5 nor had experience in any ERP implementation. That's why he was learning not only ERP5 but studied what is ERP from Business point of view. After few months of torment Ventis made a contract with Bartek so they began work together. Then Lukas realised he need more ERP5 knowledge so Ventis paid for 1 week training for Lukas. This training Lukas evaluated as 6 month speed up. He describes Nexedi developers as "really cool" and recommend France beer :). So after one year from his start with ERP5 he began to patch it.

The outcome of excellent Lukas story is that his implementation of ERP5 for Ventis was successful but takes more than 2 years (instead of expected 6 months) and demanded unplanned expenditures.

Lukas story just confirms that ERP5 deployment is really complicated. If somebody decided to apply ERP5 he/she should be ready to spent more than a year just to be able to change ERP5 for client needs. Of course deep knowledge of ZOPE 2 and Python would considerably shorten the time.

P.S. In the beginning of 2009 Lukas was hired by Nexedi and is working there up today.