History
ITMArT began as any project does:Outlining a set of requirements and then looking to see if some existing application already does what you want to accomplish. In this case, the requirements consisted of:
- an application that tracks purchase requests and purchase orders
- users would often have recurring request, a searchable catalog would be ideal
- new types of requests come up often so adding vendors and items should be easy and flexible
- orders can only be placed by select group of users with access to funds
- monthly report of expenditures would be great
- email alerts of requests from request to order to receiving
You'd think there would be some open source ERP system out there that would have these component in it, and there are: Openbravo.com and TinyERP are just two examples. The trouble is that ERP systems generally tend to focus on the needs of the business processes and not so much on the requirements of the end user. I'll get to what that means in a minute, but suffice to say this type of focus would not have worked for us.
The ERPs
Let's first look at Openbravo, a Zope application and UI nightmare. Pop-ups all over the place, difficult navigation and difficult to use forms. Tons of click-through dialogs and switching between keyboard and mouse, essentially MSDN design taken to the web. But don't just take my word for it, demo it yourself and see.
TinyERP is much better, but still focuses on the business case. For instance their forms (and top menu) make a distinction between creating a purchase order and creating the line items for that order. Which means that the user must know ahead of time that they need to create an order request first, which means that the system is not intuitive enough and will either require documentation (which no one reads) or training (which you have to pay for). Much worse, when creating the order line items, you need to specify a ton of fields and know the purchase order ID! OK, so the AJAX search helps you out for finding the order ID, but one typo and you have a clean up on aisle 9.
The last thing that makes an ERP unsuitable would be my first point, namely the focus on business processes. Usually this is not a problem, since you can make the assumption that the community is relatively stable and business oriented. The user community we have to service is a mix of bench scientists, admin assistants and business office types. There are no resources for training and the usability expectations are high.
This means that we have to shoot for the Lowest Common Denominator in terms of the overhead placed the ordering process. Making a purchase request should be as simple as creating an email, and if it is not, then there had better be some work savings later to make up for it. Order placement in TinyERP is less than ideal, but not completely onerous as Openbravo, and the work savings are that the reporting, catalog searching and order processesing are streamlined.
The deal breaker comes in the catalog management aspect. Adding items and vendors is not intuitive or easy enough for the majority of our user base. This is where focusing on the business process of catalog management really takes a pounding on usability. The central assumption here is that catalogs come from a preferred set of vendors and are bulk updated (and not very often). The broad user community means that the vendor list will be constantly changing, that pricing will be variable, and the various catalogs will be fluid. The burden of catalog management must be passed on to the purchase requester for the application to be scalable (e.g. roled out to other departments or laboratories). Centralized management of the catalog would incur too high a cost otherwise.
Conclusion
Based on these quick reviews of existing systems, I decided that further trolling through open source projects would not be worth my time. If even a simple, easy, and good looking application like TinyERP did not fit the bill, what would? A custom application, that's what.
On the next ITMArT post, we'll dicuss the actual design choices made to fulfill the list of requirements that we had mentioned at the start.
