How does it apply to your Business?¶
Now that you have discovered some of the many possibilities of Open ERP from a tour of the demonstration database, you will develop a real case. An empty database provides the starting point for testing a classic workflow from product purchase to sale, completing your guided tour and your familiarization with Open ERP.
A database loaded with demonstration data is very useful for understanding Open ERP’s general capabilities. But to explore Open ERP through a lens of your own company’s needs you should start with an empty database. You will work in this chapter on a minimal database containing no demonstration data so that there is no confusion about what you created. And you will keep the database you have created so that you can build on it throughout the rest of this book if you want to.
You will develop a real case through the following phases:
- Specify a real case.
- Describe the functional needs.
- Configure the system with the essential modules.
- Carry out the necessary data loading.
- Test the system with your database.
The case is deliberately extremely simple to provide you with a foundation for the more complex situations you will handle in reality. Throughout this chapter it is assumed that you are accessing Open ERP through its web interface. And it is also assumed (as in the rest of this book) that you are using the latest download of OpenERP version 6, the stable production version at the time of writing (not the trunk version, which is likely to have new and potentially unstable features).