I recently Investigated Vienna Advantage ERP, ERP5 and DBA Manufacturing to evaluate their suitability in place of Maestro. Vienna Advantage and DBA Manufacturing were installed from distribution on a Windows 7 VM, and ERP5 was evaluated using a provided Suse Linux VM. Unfortunately, all three were found unsuitable for one reason or another.
Vienna Advantage ERP
Vienna Advantage ERP was started in Germany and is a relative new-comer to the field. It is developed using Microsoft’s .NET platform, and uses an open-source open-core (or freemium) business model.
- The Vienna Advantage ERP core is provided under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).
- Bill-of-Materials for manufacturing is not included in the core.
- Document control is not included in the core (available as a related but separate non-open-source application).
ERP5
ERP5 has a unique architecture, using a unified business model with a core set of primitives (objects and methods), from which all other data and flows of information are derived.
- Significant learning curve due to generality of platform.
- Documentation does not include manufacturing processes.
DBA Manufacturing
DBA Manuacturing is a fully-featured proprietary Windows application, targeted at manufacturers and suitable for 5 to 50-person workgroups. Integrated financials are included but not enabled by default, it is expected the typical user will already have a financial system such as QuickBooks, and aggregated transactions will be periodically transferred to it from DBA.
- A free single-user trial version is available, although bulk data import is disabled and the company name (“DBA Sample Company”) cannot be changed.
- DBA does not include a configurator, although it does have nice support for one-off manufacturing.
- A manufacturing process can produce multiple outputs, supporting disassembly and re-manufacturing.
- DBA uses Windows peer-to-peer networking on a LAN (I.e. not over the Internet).
Hi Dale,
I’m a VIENNA Advantage ERP user (community edition) and I would like to clarify some points that you stated in this blog which might create confusion among the readers.
1. Your Statement: “The Vienna Advantage ERP core is provided under the Apache license”.
Correction: The Vienna Advantage ERP core is provided under the EPL licence.
2. Your Statement: “Bill-of-Materials for manufacturing is not included in the core.”
Correction: VIENNA Advantage ERP has 2 BOMs. A Normal BOM is included in the core. But there is also a Manufacturing BOM which is included in the manufacturing module (part of the professional
edition)
3. Your Statement: “Document control is not included in the core (available as a related but separate non-open-source application).”
Correction: There is a simple Document Control included in the core. But, VIENNA Advantage also provides a separate DMS module with more advanced features.
I hope that my comment will clarify some of the doubts that the readers might have.
Thanks Greg for the updated information. I corrected the license in the article, and will have to explore the BOM and Document Control functionality provided in the open-source core.