A Gated Product Development Process

The gated product development process has been discounted of late due to a perception of it being too rigid and inappropriate in an age of continuous integration and deployment. However, people are not continuous beings, and a continuous process is discrete at some level, such as effort measured in person days, or releases measured according to the rules of semantic versioning (version x.y.z). Discretizing can also be a mental aid, providing sign posts for the stakeholders to focus on during the continuous drive from Point A to Point B.

Product development can be discretized by dividing a project into phases, moving from concept to production, and finally retirement. I have developed a model useful for understanding product development within Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). It is based on how the involvement of resource groups changes over the life of the project, and which group provides leadership (or ownership) during each phase (leadership for a phase identified in bold).

Although Product Management is identified as a resource group, it is often not formalized in an SME and instead provided through the combined leadership of the organization, typically led by either the CEO/President/Founder, the head of Sales or the head of Engineering. The essence of a small organization is that people wear many hats, which is not an issue so long as leaders are aware which hat they need to wear when making a decision. For example, if the head of engineering is also the product domain specialist and major contributor to product management, they must be careful not to let decisions regarding which features are necessary from a customer perspective be driven by which features are attractive from a development perspective.

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April 3, 2017October 21, 2024

What is an ERP?

A software developer recently asked me “What is an ERP?”

At its heart, an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software application or system deals with four basic components of a company’s operation, and the inter-relationships between them. Different terms may be used where you are, but the concepts will be the same.

Items. You create an Item in the ERP to identify a physical things or service that you buy or sell, or a child or sub-assembly of an item. An item can also be virtual, such as hours of labor.
Stock. Stock is the quantity on hand of an item available to be “used” (consumed or sold). Stock may be considered “inventory” for financial reporting, but not necessarily. Stock may be grouped into a “lot”. If some items, for example, were made from the same jug of epoxy resin, and you wanted to associate the resin batch number with the items made from the resin). The smallest lot size is one, at which point the lot identifier is effectively a unique serial number. Stock can be increased by creating a Goods Receipt (GR) Note, and decreased through a sales order or a manufacturing order.
Orders. Orders create demand in the system and indicate work needing to be performed. Common types of orders are sales orders, purchase orders, and work orders. A sales order creates demand to ship something and a purchase order creates demand to receive something. A work order creates demand for some “output” item, created from a defined set of “input” items. For example, a work order to create one wagon from 20 wheels, 2 axle, one handle and a steel pan (or 10 wagons from 40 wheels, 20 axles…).
Invoices. Invoices record financial obligations between you and your customer. A customer invoice is created to indicate payment is due you from a customer, and a vendor invoice is created when a vendor sends you notice to pay for something. Bank payments or receipts are recorded to satisfy invoices.

An ERP also includes workflows, such as approving purchase orders before they can be issued, only allowing a purchase order to be printed once to limit accidental double orders, and requiring an approved purchase order exist and is matched to both a GR Note (indicating receipt of the goods) and a Vendor Invoice (indicating request for payment from the vendor), before payment can be issued. An ERP also controls who can perform a specific action and,for example, require that a different person receive the goods than the person who ordered the goods, to reduce the potential for accidental or intentional miss-use.

The User Experience (UX) and Graphical User Interface (GUI) of an ERP is also significant, and determines how effectively users will interact with it. Any significant gaps between the ERP’s screens and reports, and the culture and practices of the company implementing the ERP, will typically require modifying either the ERP, or the company’s practices, for a successful implementation.

You may find my tutorials on using webERP useful to see an ERP in operation. webERP is an open-source web-based ERP system that emphases a simplified design architecture and coding style to aid development and customization by non-developers (such as accountants), and for effective use over low-bandwidth internet connections.

March 28, 2017February 25, 2022

Install SuiteCRM on FreeBSD

SuiteCRM is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) web application, used by a company to store and organize information relating to customers and potential customers in a shared trusted environment. A CRM application may be stand-alone, or may integrate with other enterprise applications, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system (CRM may also be a module within an ERP system).

SuiteCRM was created by forking Sugar CE v6.5. The company SugarCRM provided several editions of Sugar CRM, including the open-source Sugar CE and several proprietary-licensed commercial editions. When SugarCRM announced in 2013 that new features would no longer be included in Sugar CE, SalesAgility, a UK-based CRM consultancy with expertise developing client solutions using Sugar CE, created SuiteCRM based on the Sugar CE v6.5 codebase. The first release of SuiteCRM was v7.0 in October 2013, and since then SuiteCRM has become an award winning world leading CRM application.

Setup

I will be installing SuiteCRM v7.7.9 on FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE, using Apache 2.4 and MariaDb 10.0.

Download a SuiteCRM zip distribution archive and extract to /usr/local/www/suitecrm-7.7.9
Change owner of the SuiteCRM directory tree to www:www
Create a soft link from /usr/local/www/suitecrm to /usr/local/www/suitecrm-7.7.9
Configure Apache virtual host suitecrm.dalescott.net
Create “suitecrm” database and database user with full permissions to the database.
Run installer (http://suitecrm.dalescott.net).

The first thing the installer does is to confirm your acceptance of the AGPL license used by SuiteCRM.

The installer then presents an overview of your system configuration, and identifies any issues preventing installation. In my case, I’m good to proceed.

Next, enter your database credentials and other configuration data.

Select install demo data.
Enter admin user password and email.
Accept default visible modules.
Enter SMTP server credentials required for SuiteCRM to send email.

The installer will setup the database and then let you login as the admin user.

The last setup item is to create a cron task used by SuiteCRM to run periodic internal tasks.

TODO show cron job

Login

March 26, 2017February 25, 2022

Install X2CRM on FreeBSD

X2CRM (also known as X2Engine) is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) web application, used by a company to store and organize information relating to customers and potential customers in a shared trusted environment. A CRM application may be stand-alone, or may integrate with other enterprise applications, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system (CRM may also be a module within an ERP system).

I became aware of X2CRM after discovering erpBooks “Online Inventory Management” , reportedly forked from webERP and including CRM functionality based on X2Engine (aka X2CRM).

X2CRM was founded by John Roberts, who had previously co-founded SugarCRM. His goal was to develop a superior user interface using a new data model, and to use current web technologies, compared to the first generation of open-source web CRMs. Coincidently, X2CRM was developed using the PHP Yii OO RAD framework, which I had used for my Maestro project.

X2CRM also affirmed John’s faith in an open-source development and business model. X2Engine initially used a “Freemium” business model to support itself, and provided commercial Professional and Platinum versions. However, in April 2016, X2Engine announced it had achieved revenue self-sufficiency as a company, and it was now appropriate to release all premium features of the Platinum version as open-source in the then upcoming v6.0 release (fyi, I will be installing v6.5.2).

Setup

I will be installing X2CRM on FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE, using Apache 2.4 and MariaDb 10.0.

Download a X2CRM zip distribution archive and extract to e.g. /usr/local/www/x2crm-6.5.2.
Create a soft link from /usr/local/www/crm to /usr/local/www/x2crm-6.5.2
Configure Apache virtual host crm.dalescott.net (the server directory root will be /usr/local/www/crm/x2engine)
Run installer (http://crm.dalescott.net/x2engine)

Set owner of X2CRM directory tree to www:www
Install package pecl-ssh2
Install package php56-filter
Set session.save_path in /usr/local/etc/php.ini to /tmp
Add path to mysql executables to the path used by the Apache daemon.

# mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/apache24/envvars.d/
# echo 'export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:' > /usr/local/etc/apache24/envvars.d/path.env
# chmod 755 /usr/local/etc/apache24/envvars.d/path.env
# service apache24 restart

Run installer again. Hurray! Requirements met!

Create “x2engine” database and database user with full permissions to the database. Use these credentials in the install screen.
Check “Create sample data”.
Enter admin user password and email.
Accept default visible modules.
Create cron task. I selected “Create a cron task for X2CRM”, after which I was given the opportunity to select when to run the task, or simply hourly. I selected hourly, which resulted in creating a crontab file for user www (/var/cron/tabs/www).

# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (/usr/local/www/x2crm-6.5.2/x2engine/.crontab.tmp installed on Sun Mar 26 20:44:57 2017)
# (Cron version -- $FreeBSD: releng/10.3/usr.sbin/cron/crontab/crontab.c 293132 2016-01-04 03:20:41Z pfg $)

#<X2CRM>
@hourly curl http://crm.dalescott.net/index.php/api/x2cron &>/dev/null #@X2CRM@default#@X2CRM@Run delayed or recurring tasks within X2CRM
#</X2CRM>

Install!

Login

Once authenticated, the X2CRM dashboard is presented. There’s a lot of information, and the bottom of the dashboard is the message feed.