I am about to give a pitch to our MD to try to convince him ERPNExt is the best thing since sliced bread
I want to go for the ERPNExt.com hosted solution as we really do not have the technical abilities to self host or even use things like bitnami. I think it is better left with the poepl who know the product best. And I know the question he will ask. How safe are they? How long have they been around etc
Can anyone give me a rough idea of how many business are using ERPNExt hosting solutions? Ideally with a break down of numbers on each plan as that could give us an idea of the size of businesses involved
Hey Ron, glad that you have an interest in ERPNext. But honestly, I think it’s the second best thing since sliced bread, first being French Toast. It’s a hard truth.
We have about a total of ~4000 accounts which includes trials, free accounts and paid accounts, and we have ~300 active companies using the paid hosting as of this moment.
Apart from that, there should be ~1000 companies using it in total (This includes companies with their own custom ERPNext setup). It’s difficult to track usage for an open source project
Excellent, thanks for the reply. And Yes, i tend to agree about french toast, or eggy bread as we call it
So my pitch would be
“300 active using ERPNExt hosted solutions, with many more in trial. Probably around 1000 using their own hosting solutions. So if we use ERPNExt hosted and take daily backups on dropbox then even if things go wrong we can switch to using a local virtual machine to keep us using the system”
Along with that, I think open source is one of ERPNext’s biggest advantages. Because it makes the project to be bigger than we are, and even if we stopped working on it, ERPNext will still live.
For what its worth I would pitch
“There are currently over 1100 companies using ERPNext situated across 150 different countries around the globe. With ~2000 business currently in the early stages of trailing ERPNext the project momentum is excellent”
Forget mentioning some people using a “plan B” in regards hosting as I have found this inevitably leads you into a world of competitive quote chasing pain. Just let Frappe look after your hosting and software updates and sleep easy knowing you have frappe support. Your MD will be none the wiser.
It would be interesting to know how many languages are currently in use.
Opps just read you might move to local virtual machine later… Sorry its late here… But the rule of not giving the beancounters to many IT options still holds true in my experience.
Pitch went well with a cautious optimism. The idea of frappe hosting with the security of daily backups to drop box allowing us to drop to Virtualbox as a last resort went down well
So my task now is to come up with an implementation plan. Very difficult when we already have a comprehensive system in place that works well.
Just my 2 cents based on not knowing anything about your company, personal workload or IT ability:
Before writing up an implementation plan as such:
1: Find out what your current ERP export features are and then and export some files in .CSV format. 100 files should be enough to test.
2: Open up a demo ERPNext account.
3: Import files.
4: Curse in local dialect when it doesn’t work.
This is bound to happen and is inherent in all database transitions not just ERPNext. And I do mean all.
5: Enter as many of your company’s default settings manually via ERPNext UI as possible.
6: Add a few sales/service items that your company provides
7: Present MD with working demo (make sure your company logo is visible in demo…MD’s love their logo.)
8: Write up implementation plan
9: ???
10: PROFIT!!!
Best of luck
May I ask what system or systems you currently use?
We are currently using a Microsoft Access system. It is a number of interlinked databases accessed via peer to peer network. Lots of VBA involved. I have heavily modified it since its original creator. Because it was written for us, and modified by me it is perfect for our needs. But not really up to multiple users with such a large amount of data all accessing over wireless peer to peer. It is creaking at the seems now.
Not to mention quite a large amount of double (even triple) entry needed. Was great when the business was small with a couple of users, but now as we grow …
One of the big problems is that Microsoft Access latest incarnation has fundamentally changed how it does certain things so we can never update the software now
Sounds like a really good time to change away from your current system then. If you have managed to maintain and modify the Access DB and understand all the business processes involved ERPNext should be pretty easy for you I reckon. Good Luck
