Who is using Ofbiz?

The short answer is: Lots of companies, both big and small.

Bonsai ERP ™ is based on the Apache Open For Business (OFBiz) project. OFBiz has been continuously developed since 2001 and has users in six continents worldwide.

I Want One of Those (IWOOT)

Online retailer I Want One Of Those (IWOOT) tried two commercial ERP systems, and both failed to deliver. OFBiz gave them much more ability to customise their ERP system to the unique needs of their business, and much more reliability.

Web link: www.information-age.com/channels/business-applications/it-case-studies/825137/iwoots-open-source-odyssey.thtml
OR tinyurl.com/bonsaierp003

ToolEast ERP

ToolEast ERP is an EU sponsored project that has created an ERP system for tool and die manufacturers in Eastern Europe.

The European Commission found that manufacturers in Eastern Europe had the technical capability to supply tools and dies to big European manufacturing companies, especially automobile makers. Yet, they were not getting this work – much of it was going to Asian manufacturers instead.

What the Eastern European companies lacked was organization and the ability to integrate themselves into the supply chain of large manufacturers. So the EU sponsored a project to develop an ERP system for them. OpenTaps, which is based on OFBiz, was selected as the basis for ToolEast ERP.

Web link: tooleast.net

United States Air Force

Consultants at Integral Business Solutions used OFBiz to implement a web-based document management system to streamline and centralise management of contractors for the US Air Force. Integral completed the project in six months, and they are certain that it would have taken much longer without the OFBiz platform.

Web link: docs.ofbiz.org/download/attachments/851/IntegralAirForceCaseStudy.pdf
OR tinyurl.com/bonsaierp001

Honeywell

Honeywell International provides spare parts, repair, and maintenance services to commercial airlines and governments. In one project for the United States government, Honeywell provides complete repair and maintenance services for the engine of a major vehicle system for the United States Department of Defense. Honeywell maintain an adequate supply of the engine and its spare parts both in the field and at four maintenance depots around the world.

Honeywell needed to plan the manufacturing of the engine and its associated parts. This meant it had to project demand for both the engine and the parts over several years and take into account field demand for the engine, the bill of materials which specified its parts, and the existing stock of the engine and parts in the various maintenance depots. The particular engine has over 1600 parts in a nine-level bill of materials. The analysis also had to account for the ability of the depots to refurbish some of the spare parts so that they could be used again for future maintenance. Finally, Honeywell needed to examine multiple demand scenarios to determine the adequate level of stock.

In the past, this complex analysis was done by 25 Excel spreadsheets with custom models that used pivot tables and lookups. Running the analysis was then both slow and time-consuming. In 2007, a team from Honeywell International worked with Logistics Modeling Center Inc (LMCI) to create a centralized database for all the demand forecast data, and then develop a custom model to analyze the data and project inventory levels and production requirements. LMCI, however, suggested a novel approach: they recommended that Honeywell use the opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM system and leverage its existing supply chain management features for inventory planning, instead of rebuilding its custom models from scratch. Like Bonsai ERP, opentaps is based on the OFBiz framework.

LMCI implemented a specialized solution which integrated inventory data and projected demand from Honeywell into the system. The system manages orders and warehouse inventory, and projects future demand for both the engine and all 1600 parts, level by level down the bill of materials. It creates requests to transfer inventory and parts between the maintenance depots, and finally creates a multi-year master production schedule.

The entire project took less than three months for the combined Logistics Modeling Center and Open Source Strategies team to complete, including customizations, reports, and documentation.

Web link: www.opentaps.org/docs/index.php/Opentaps_Honeywell_Supply_Chain_Solution
OR tinyurl.com/bonsaierp004

Snaidero

Snaidero Engineering and Trading are Italy’s number one kitchen cabinet manufacturer, with worldwide partners and a global supply chain.

Adopting OFBiz has allowed them to share, encourage and ensure know-how and best practices with partners. Snaidero found it was much more cost-effective to make a one-off investment in tailoring OFBiz than to repeatedly license commercial manufacturing software for each of their partners.

Web links: opensourcestrategies.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_archive.html
OR tinyurl.com/bonsaierp007

British Telecom

British Telecom use OFBiz to build a product catalog manager and online ordering system for mobile products and services. BT have over 18 million residential and commercial customers in the UK, and the site has been designed to cater for up to 16,000 simultaneous visitors using a cluster of 72 CPUs.

BT chose to use proprietary software for parts of their system: the Solaris operating system and Oracle database. They selected what they considered the best solution for each part of the system.

Citigroup Procurement System

Citigroup use OFBiz for a corporate procurement system for 300,000 users in over a hundred countries. OFBiz replaced an inflexible, difficult-to-use system. The new system was completed in three months. The OFBiz system connects to a product manager database and two fulfilment systems.

Web link: eu.apachecon.com/presentation/materials/0000/0121/ai_presentation.pdf
OR tinyurl.com/bonsaierp009

More success stories

See docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBIZ/Apache+OFBiz+User+Stories
OR tinyurl.com/bonsaierp002 for more OFBiz success stories.

See also ofbiz.info”, ofbiz.biz (in German) and In The Press.