Category: Business

Of interest to business enterprises.

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Install ERPNext on FreeBSD 11.2 using VirtualBox

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The simplest way to “install” ERPNext on FreeBSD is to simply use the Virtual Image provided by the ERPNext project with VirtualBox.

The ERPNext project provides the Easy Install script for bare-metal installation but it has a number of Linux dependencies and will not work without changes on FreeBSD. Happily, the project also provides a fully configured virtual machine (based on Ubuntu Linux).

It may also be possible to use bhyve, the BSD hypervisor, with the virtual image, but the OVF file must first be converted to bhyve’s raw format.

Install VirtualBox

Install the virtualbox-ose-nox11 package for running headless virtual machines.

% sudo pkg install virtualbox-ose-nox11

The VirtualBox kernel module (virtualbox-ose-kmod) will also be installed, but it must be re-compiled from source and re-installed (at the very least, the system will crash when next re-booted once it has been configured to load the kernel module at boot). 

Update the ports collection to prepare for compiling the kernel module. 

# portsnap fetch update

If the ports collection has not been installed, install.

# portsnap fetch extract

The FreeBSD sources are required to compile the kernel module. If not already installed, install the FreeBSD sources.

% fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/11.2-RELEASE/src.txz % tar -C / -xzvf src.txz

Compile and install the virtualbox-ose-kmod port. Make will first refuse to install the module because it is already installed (recall it was installed by being a dependency of virtualbox-ose-nox11). De-install the virtualbox-ose-kmod package, then re-install the newly compiled version.

% cd /usr/ports/emulators/virtualbox-ose-kmod
% sudo make
% sudo make install
% sudo make deinstall
% sudo make reinstall

Perform post-install configuration.

1) edit /boot/loader.conf to load the vboxdrv kernel module at boot,

# vi /boot/loader.conf
...
vboxdrv_load="YES"

2) increase AIO limits by editing /etc/sysctl.conf (my server is using AIO, for more information refer to the virtualbox-ose-nox11 pkg-message).

vfs.aio.max_buf_aio=8192
vfs.aio.max_aio_queue_per_proc=65536
vfs.aio.max_aio_per_proc=8192
vfs.aio.max_aio_queue=65536

Reboot the system to load the kernel module (or load it manually).

Make a mental note before doing an OS update to first edit /boot/loader.conf to not load the module. Otherwise the system will likely crash when next rebooted.

The user that VirtualBox runs as must be a member of the vboxusers group. For simplicity, I’ll run VirtualBox using my own username, although best practise would be to create a dedicated user.

# pw groupmod vboxusers -m dale

Edit /etc/rc.conf to run vboxwebsrv (the Virtual Box web interface daemon) using the provided startup script installed in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/

% sudo vi /etc/rc.conf

vboxwebsrv_enable="YES"
vboxwebsrv_user="dale"

and finally start the vboxwebsrv service.

% sudo service vboxwebsrv start
% sudo service vboxwebsrv status

The vboxmanage cli utility can be used to manage virtual machines but I will be using phpVirtualBox which provides a familiar GUI.

Install phpVirtualBox

phpVirtualBox can be installed from the FreeBSD ports collection but it currently has a dependency on PHP 7.1 while I have PHP 7.2. I installed phpVirtualBox manually to avoid pkg attempting to revert my PHP install to 7.1, and have not encountered any issues.

Download the latest release from the phpVirtualBox Github project . Follow the instructions in README.md file and on the wiki. Extract the project to /usr/local/www, and edit the configuration.

# vi /usr/local/www/phpvirtualbox/config.php

var $username = 'dale';
var $password = 'dale_login_password';

Configure the webserver to serve phpVirtualBox. I’m using the basic Apache 2.4 http server package. I added a virtual host definition to /usr/local/etc/apache24/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf to serve phpvirtualbox as a phpvirtualbox.dalescott.net.

<VirtualHost phpvirtualbox.dalescott.net>
  DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/phpvirtualbox"
  <Directory "/usr/local/www/phpvirtualbox">
    allow from all
    Options None
    Require all granted
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Change the default phpVirtualBox login password to something secure after logging in for the first time.

“Install” ERPNext

Download the desired ERPNext Virtual Machine image (*.ova).

% cd ~/downloads
% wget http://build.erpnext.com/ERPNext-Production.ova

Using phpVirtualBox, create a new vm by importing the downloaded ERPNext-Production.ova Virtual Image file (File/Import). The OVF includes port forwarding rules to forward client port 80 to host port 8080 (for serving ERPNext) and a rule to forward ssh from client port 22 to host port 3022 (for system administration).

Start the vm and then login to ERPNext from a browser (e.g. www.dalescott.net:8080) using the default credentials. The new site wizard will run and lead you through ERPNext configuration. Use a secure password when defining the initial (admin) user, and the wizard will delete the initial Administrator user (with default password) when complete. 

Once logged into ERPNext, setup email processing so that users will receive notifications outside of ERPNext. This will be valuable to understanding and appreciating ERPNext’s significant social aspect. You will also want to change the system login (i.e. ssh) password for “frappe” user to something secure (or disable password authentication entirely in favor of key-based authentication).

Cheers,
Dale

 

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Has your server been owned?

Do you know what your server is doing when you’re not watching?

The morning mail delivered another phishing attempt. Someone apparently wants to send me money. I should be so lucky!

It was an obvious attempt since I don’t know any Katelyn’s, let alone one who would want to send me money. However, my browser was asking if I wanted to load the images, and that was curious.

Who was gruppoaceto.it I wondered? Were they an Italian anonymous file sharing site?

A little more typing and I learned “Gruppo Aceto” is an Italian automobile dealer.  Could Katelyn be working there?

 

Reports indicating what your servers are doing are probably already available, but is anyone reviewing them? Keep your systems maintained, but please, please, take a look at your log files every once in a while. 

Dale

 

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PLM using Parts&Vendors

Parts&VendorsTM from Trilogy Design was the seminal PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) software in the late 90’s for small teams who needed to manage design and purchasing information. A spreadsheet approach can be perfectly adequate if you have only one BOM (Bill of Materials) and each part is sourced from only one supplier, but quickly loses effectiveness when planning or purchasing for product builds with the same part being used in multiple sub-assemblies, and it gets worse if a part is available from multiple sources. Parts&Vendors uses a database, which allows the same part to be referenced by as many assemblies as needed, or as many sources as needed.

Parts&Vendors was originally released for Windows 98SE, and provided a single point of truth for everything to do with product development (parts, BOMs, suppliers, purchasing, supporting documents, etc.) that could be accessed by anyone in the team. It even even included rudimentary inventory and build management. Parts&Vendors enabled teams to work more efficiently with more cooperation and less bureaucracy, and was affordable by the smallest businesses – only US$69/user if you didn’t need per-user login, creating purchase orders or an ECO workflow (and only slightly more if you did).

Parts&Vendors was discontinued in January 2014 when Trilogy-Design folded operations, essentially a casualty of insurmountable technical debt. Although no longer available for purchase, Parts&Vendors is the oldest software I use on a daily basis, and my gold standard for evaluating software PLM features for use by SMEs – both dedicated PLM software as well as general purpose ERP software.

Parts&Vendors Overview

Item Master Tab

Parts are accessed through the Item Master tab, and the list of parts can be sorted, filtered or searched as needed.

Item Details

Selecting a part provides detailed information on sources (vendors) as well as other useful information.

Files and URLs

Documents and web sites can be associated with a part,

making it easy to access saved documents or a web page for reference.

Although it wasn’t formal document control with a submit/approve/check-in/check-out type workflow, the simple approach was adequate for a conscientious team.

Assemblies

A part may be grouped with others in an Assembly. You can easily tell what assemblies include a particular part in PV from the part’s Used On tab. 

It’s also easy to navigate from a part to a containing assembly, and back. This is also called traversing a product tree containing child parts and parent parts.

An assembly has a Parts List (aka Bill-of-Materials or BOM) that lists its child parts.

Purchasing

Parts can be easily ordered,

and an order can be left “open” to accumulate parts until it was decided to place the order, resulting in a purchase Purchase Order (PO). In some organizations the PO would be sent directly to the vendor, while in other organizations the PO would be sent internally as a “purchase request” to issue a “real” PO.

Purchasing could also be performed for a BOM, including any sub-assemblies, by selecting the top-level BOM and quantity, and generating a Purchase List,

and then generating Purchase Orders from the Purchase List.

Receiving

When the ordered parts arrive, the PO is retrieved and the order item marked received, 

which updates the stock on hand.

The assembly Parts List is one way to see when the parts necessary to build an assembly are in stock.

Manufacturing

Once all the child parts for an assembly are in stock, a “Kit List” is generated from the “Build” tab for manufacturing. Stock on hand can be reduced for the kitted items, and later increased for the finished assembly when completed. 

Customers

PV can also manage clients and client orders, although the functionality is not integrated with stock control and closing an order does not reduce quantity on hand of the ordered items. However, the limitations were acceptable given the it was never the intent of P&V to also be a first-class POS (Point Of Sale) or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. 

Security and User Permissions

Out-of-the-box, Parts&Vendors allowed anyone to do anything, which made setup easy and promoted user adoption. If more control was needed to prevent users from inadvertently causing trouble, user logins could be used and assigned to groups with assigned role-based permissions.

First, create a group with appropriate permissions.

Then create a user and assign to the appropriate group.

Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed this limited look at Parts&Vendors. In my experience, it combined the features and ease of use needed for small teams to be efficient, without imposing overhead they are unable to support. The paradox of enterprise software is that you may need it once you are successful, but you won’t have the resources to use it until you are successful.

If you are using Parts&Vendors and need advise or help migrating to a new system, please contact me using the Contact form. Parts&Vendors includes built-in export capability that can be used if you are methodical, and there are also ways to access database data directly without using Microsoft AccessTM (JET database schema and user interface IDE) or if using a Unix-type operating system.

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Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) using ERPNext

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Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) involves managing everything about a product from cradle to grave – from design and new product introduction (NPI) to termination or end-of-life. PLM encompasses product management, engineering design, product-specific business and manufacturing processes, new product introduction (NPI), and product data management. A PLM system integrates people, parts, processes and issues, and provides a trustable and transparent infrastructure backbone for the business.

Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) is a superset of PLM. ERP was born from a manufacturing need, but a modern ERP today includes accounting and financials, sales, customer relationship management, human resource management, and other core business systems – including PLM. However, modern ERP systems have also become complicated and expensive, and a successful implementation often requires that the business more conform to the ERP than vice versa. A new type of ERP is emerging, called Postmodern ERP. Postmodern ERPs are designed from the ground up to be simple and flexible, more capable of modelling a business than imposing conformity, and available to organizations of even modest requirements or means.

ERPNext is a postmodern ERP system, and includes basic PLM functionality. Although not as feature-rich as a dedicated PLM might be, ERPNext is capable for many situations, it is also less complicated, already integrated, and a capable starting point to build on. Features of ERPNext related to PLM include:

  • Integrated data. Items (parts), purchase specifications, engineering design documents, revisions, projects, issues, etc. All information is conveniently managed in one consistent system.
  • Visible, trusted, change management with social notification.
  • Scaled according to number of users, number of items and complexity of product trees, supply chain complexity, etc.

This tutorial will follow the Aircraft Wireless product designed and manufactured by the fictional Swift Construction Company.

Goals

The goals of this tutorial are to:

  • Create child and parent items to model an assembly.
  • Identify item supplier information for purchasing, including purchase and OEM specifications.
  • Demonstrate a suitable change management process.

Future revisions of this post will expand on topics such as including anticipated purchase, process and labour costs for preliminary cosgt analysis, and defining appropriate work centers in the manufacturing process.

Definitions

Here are some terms defined in the context here.

  • CSV (Command Separated Value). CSV is a common text data interchange format, with data values separated by commas. E.g. ’12,”this is text, not a number”, 15.0′ might be one line from a CSV file (notice the text is quoted because of a contained comma). Although the acronym specifies the data element separator is a comma, other separator characters such as a tab or semi-colon are also often used.
  • ECO (Engineering Change Order). The name of a change management process often found in an engineering or manufacturing environment, which defines the process for making a change to an item, and thereby changing its revision level. Sometimes the ECO process is preceded by an Engineering Change Request (ECR) process in a two-phase ECR/ECO process.
  • OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). Items may be purchased from distributors, and there may be more than one distributor selling a particular OEM item. In this case, often it is the OEM item that is critical, not who it is purchased from.
  • Release. A release is a milestone in the development life-cycle of a top-level or child item, and is associated with a specific revision-level. A release provides a convenient point for synchronizing various project activities, including product features and capability, purchasing and manufacturing activities, press releases, pre-production and trade show demos, etc.
  • Revision Level. An item carries has a revision level, that can be used to reference the item, and its supporting documentation, as it existed at a particular point in time. An item, and its revision level, can be updated following a well-defined process.

Item Codes and Revision Levels

I will use an “8+2” format item code, with 8 digits to specify the unique item (aka part number), and 2 digits to specify the item’s revision level.

The following is the bill of materials for the custom inductor in the Aircraft Wireless.

20000001-00,"IND,830UH,AIRCRAFT WIRELESS"
|-- 90000001-00,"WIRE,MAGNET,38AWG,POLY"
|-- 90000002-00,"MAG,FERRITE ROD,1/4IN X 4IN,MATL=61"
\-- 90000003-00,"TAPE,ELECTRICAL,3/4"",BLUE,VINYL"

I will need to create the parts required for the SCC Aircraft Wireless Release-1 prototype .  To create a new item, access the Item List in ERPNext and click New.

If necessary, a new unit of measure (UOM) can be created on the fly for the unit an item is managed in and consumed by.

The unit of measure for the wire in the custom inductor (PN 90000001-00) is centimetres (cm), meaning the wire will be inventoried in cm and consumed by the cm. However, it will be purchased in the vendor’s unit of measure, which is a Spool. Both cm and Spool will need to be created as they are not already defined in ERPNext’s UOM List.

The purchase UOM for an item is specified in the Purchase Details section of the item master data.

Be aware that the default UOM also determintes the inventory stock quantity. Because the default UOM for the wire is centimeters, inventory will also be managed in centimeters. In an inventory audit, it will be necessary to convert from counted full spools to centimeters because the audit count will be in centimeters. Depending on the business, there are other out-of-box options which may work better in practise.

When the purchase UOM for an item is different from the item’s default UOM, the relationship or conversation factor must be specified in the Units of Measure section of the Item master data. In the case of the inductor wire, the conversion factor from spool to cm is 588,264 (the datasheet for the wire indicates a spool contains 19,300 feet of wire, and 19300 ft x 30.48 cm/ft  gives 588,264 cm/Spool).

Supplier details are also entered in the Item master data, including specifying the OEM and OEM part number if relevant.

An image can be associated with an item in the item master data for the convenience of users in recognising or understanding the item. Files and other documents that specify or support the item can also be attached, such as the supplier catalogue page, a preliminary supplier quotation, or engineering design documents.

Attach Supporting Documentation

If a document already uploaded pertains to multiple items, the already-uploaded document can be attached instead of uploading a new document. It is also possible to enter item master data by importing CSV format data. This would likely be the preferred method when implementing ERPNext for an established organization.

Create Bills of Materials

Child items of a parent are specified using a Bill of Materials (BOM), including child item quantities. ERPNext revisions BOMs independently from Items, and creates BOM-20000001-00-001 as the initial BOM for Item 20000001-00.

Managing Change

Using the revisioning strategy outlined here, revising a child item in ERPNext can be done by simply duplicating it and increase the revision level in the Item Code. The revision level of the child’s parent item may or may be changed, depending on the policies of the organization. Generally a change in fit, form, or function mandates at least a revision level change, if not a completely new item with new root item code. The revision level of the parent may not be required to change if the fit, form or function of the parent has not changed as a result of the child’s revision.

If the revision level of the parent is not required to change, the parent’s BOM can simply be updated with the new child revision level. ERPNext will create a new BOM revision level, but the revision level of the parent item is not affected. If the revision level of the parent does change, a new BOM will need to be created for the new revision level of the parent (and listing the child at its new revision level).

Organizations typically have an approval process for revising a product, often called an Engineering Change Order (ECO) process. An approval signature document is commonly used to capture approval from stakeholders, including product management, engineering, sales, manufacturing, quality and finance. The signed approval document can be attached to the related item or BOM in ERPNext.

Summary

This has been a short overview of PLM using ERPNext. Although ERPNext is not a dedicated PLM system, its out-of-box capabilities are more than adequate to support basic PLM operations. Should additional capabilities be necessary, they can be developed on the ERPNext platform itself, or dedicated PLM software (existing or custom developed) can be integrated with ERPNext.

Please leave a comment or use the contact form for more information.