ApacheCon US 2008 Session

Experiences with Real World OFBiz Projects

OFBiz project is for all type of company, from very large company head-office with multiple subsidiary, 40,000 employee, a MIT department to SME with 50 employee and no dedicate people for MIT. This presentation will describe one project for each extreme.

The large company project has started in November 2007 in the head quarter and in January 2008 in a subsidiary, currently some sub-project are still actives. In this organization, head office solution are not mandatory for the subsidiary, they can choose their MIT solution and how to deploy and how to be supported. This project is drived by eCommerce, but the warehouse management project was a large one too (6 month, 4 full time). Company has build a internal community around all subproject to continue to be drive by the business on a down to top approach. Each new sub-project which starts demonstrate the relevance of the solution.

The SME project is a ERP migration from a standard solution (BaaN) to a more free-sofware solution. OFBiz has been deployed with a OOTB extention, Order, Facility, Manufacturing, Accounting have been implemented in 7 month (January to July 2006). Consulting was for training, parameters assistance, usage definition assistance, data migration and some development too but only few days (less than 30d) and all development have been reversed to the community to be sure to have at the end of the prooject a standard solution. From the go day with ofbiz, company continue to increase number of functionalities they use as they need it.