I'm looking for a robust system basically to manage inventory. I'm working on a project to manage tens of thousands of items (industrial spare parts), all of them virtual, but I need to have a place to store list price, our distributor price, our markup, manufacturer, mfgr contact information and then publish them to our catalogs and website (will probably use old CSV format for export/import).
I know this could be accomplished using a simple Excel Spreadsheet but I wanted to take it to the next level, because eventually these parts are going to be sold, so I need Accounting Integration (Invoicing, POs, Profit and Loss etc), and probably a lot of reporting (to be able to create some scripts to update inventory, pricing, etc.)
I've tried basically all the major ERP Open Source software; we use OpenBravo as our company's main accounting software. Although I believe OB is robust, its very bulky, resource consuming (I can be at 4 GB RAM at idle, although I believe there's a memory leak somewhere), and it's also painfully slow.
I have also tried OpenERP (now Odoo), and think it is a complete amateur system, with lots of "half baked" modules which I would not use on a serious production environment.
I decided to go either ADempiere or IDempiere, and after seeing the Idempiere had almost 8000 Downloads from Sourceforge last week and very complete information from Mr. Chuck Boecking @ http://www.chuckboecking.com/
Installation
Well, I cannot explain the pain it was to install this software on a regular Ubuntu 14.04 Server. I had to Clone a new copy of Ubuntu like 6 times (Thankfully I'm using virtual machines so I can just easily clone it).
I used as my guide Mr. Chuck Boecking http://www.chuckboecking.com/idempiere-quick-start-guide/ which after a couple of times did not work.
Then I jumped to the official iDempiere Wiki and was surprised how bad it was, after almost two hours I had it installed, but after the installation finally finished, the service would not start.
At this point and by mere luck I found that Chuck had recently posted an updated script for the installation. I ran that script, but again the server did not start. With a new error: “ERROR: relation “ad_table””
I googled a bit and finally solved the issue running RUN_ImportIdempiere.sh which recreated the missing tables on the database.
Special thanks to Chuck for the good work he's doing with iDempiere, he's probably one of the few driving forces behind the project.