ERP5: The Open Source ERP System for European Industry

ERP5, an open source ERP system based on Zope/CMF framework, was officially presented at EuroPython 2003 conference. A live demonstration of an ERP5 system used by a large apparel factory located 200 km away from Charleroi was shown. The system is published under GPL license and has been the first ERP solution exclusively based on open source/free software to be successfully implemented in European industry since January 2003. During the presentation, a VPN tunnel was created between Charleroi and Gravelines where the largest ERP5 implementation is located.

The system was used simultaneously by 60 users and includes more than 80,000 records and about 800,000 lines in its largest table. Jean-Paul Smets, leader of the ERP5 project and CEO of Nexedi SARL, explains that ERP5 is built on the concept of variation, which allows to manage an unlimited number of variations of each product reference. The system uses a simple model with only 5 concepts: resource, node, movement, item, and path. Information is recorded on the Zope persistent database and indexed on a MySQL relational database, providing much higher scalability. Thierry Brettnacher, COO of Coramy, concludes that ERP5 is based on the best of the Zope application server and CMF framework and has been successfully implemented in their company.