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M ASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA
FAKULTA INFORMATIKY
D IPLOMOVÁ PRÁCA
Ján Segéň
Brno, 2014
Declaration
Hereby I declare, that this paper is my original authorial work, which
I have worked out by my own. All sources, references and literature
used or excerpted during elaboration of this work are properly cited
and listed in complete reference to the due source.
Ján Segéň
ii
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my gratitude to Ing. Leonard Walletzký, Ph.D.
for his guidance and assistance during the writing of this thesis. Furt-
hermore I would like to thank my family, friends, flat mates and my
girlfriend for the continuous support and faith they have given me.
The final thanks goes to my newly acquired angry birds mascot who
has supplied me with luck for the duration of writing this thesis and
hopefully will continue to do so.
iii
Abstract
The goal of this thesis is to analyze and compare the way different
online shops store and process information. Find useful similarities
and utilize them to implement a tool that enables the open-source
ERP system iDempiere to establish a communication link to the elect-
ronic stores categorized as compatible, effectively giving iDempiere
e-commerce capabilities.
iv
Keywords
ERP, iDempiere, e-commerce, e-shop, electronic store, eConnect, plug-
in, data connector, import, export, data synchronization
v
Obsah
1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2 ERP Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1 History of ERP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2 ERP classification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.3 Current trends in ERP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.4 Adapting ERP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.5 Open-source ERP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3 iDempiere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.1 About iDempiere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.2 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.3 Working with iDempiere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.4 Development of new features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.5 Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
4 E-Commerce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.2 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4.3 Online shopping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
5 Connecting ERP and e-commerce systems . . . . . . . . . . 19
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
5.2 Current situation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
5.2.1 iDempiere export and import functionality . . . 20
5.2.2 E-shop side data connectors . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
5.2.3 Middleware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
5.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
6 eConnect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
6.1 Analysis of demands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
6.2 E-Commerce systems analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
6.2.1 Data architecture similarities . . . . . . . . . . . 27
6.2.2 Specific example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
7 Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
7.1 Custom tables creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
7.2 Custom tables registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
7.3 iDempiere plug-in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
7.3.1 Export processes package . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
7.3.2 Import processes package . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
vi
7.3.3 Utility classes package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
8 Testing and Deployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
8.1 Problems encountered during implementation and tes-
ting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
8.2 Universality of eConnect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
8.3 Setting up eConnect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
8.4 Functionality scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
10 Electronic attachments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
11 Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
vii
1 Introduction
Information technology has changed the way we live, how we work
and how we conduct our daily affairs. E-mail, instant messaging and
voice transfer software enables us to communicate more efficiently
and comfortably than ever before. Text and table processors allow us
to work with higher amounts of information with the same ease. The
internet has provided us with a connection to the whole world. It is
also the largest information repository known today.
Businesses were also influenced in many ways by the advance-
ments in information technology. One of the many impacts it had is
the introduction of automated company and business process mana-
gement, which is nowdays present in the form of an Enterprise re-
source planning (ERP) software. This system integrates key business
components, such as manufacturing, sales, business partner manage-
ment, human resources, and many more. By correctly implementing
and utilizing the ERP software, it can bring many advantages to the
company in form of process optimalization, increased data accessa-
bility and transparency and ultimately in internal savings.
A very important factor that impacts the success of a company
is a correctly chosen ERP that optimally fits the company’s business
processes. A large scale of different ERP systems is currently avai-
lable on the market. Companies should devote a reasonable amount
of time and resources to analyze what ERP system is the most su-
itable depending on many implicite factors.
One of the factors is the ERP system’s capability to incorporate e-
commerce solutions. The modern business slowly moves its sphere
of influence to the internet, which is a fresh and evloving market.
The popularity of e-commerce applications is rising rapidly, and are
becoming a standard part of the modern business.
The goal of this diploma thesis is to provide e-commerce con-
nection capabilities to the open-souce ERP system iDempiere. This
is achieved by developing a tool called eConnect, which is capable
of accepting specific settings that allow it to establish a connection,
migrate and synchronize data with variety of today’s electronic sto-
res, thus present a certain level of universality which allows compa-
nies to implement e-commerce tools that currently, due to various
1
1. I NTRODUCTION
2
2 ERP Systems
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is the name for a type
of business process management software that is dedicated to integ-
rate all departments and functions across a company into a single
computer system. ERP systems incorporate most or all of the com-
pany’s core stages of business [1], which are:
3
2. ERP S YSTEMS
4
2. ERP S YSTEMS
The increased spread of the World Wide Web introduced the possibi-
lity of implementing also customer oriented Front Office functiona-
lity, such as:
5
2. ERP S YSTEMS
• Manufacturing
• Logistics
• Finance
• Human resources
All-in-One
As the name suggests, this type of ERP covers all key business com-
ponents and its aim is to be universal and flexible. These systems can
be applied in a variety of companies with a pleasing result. The di-
sadvantage for some businesses may be that the system components
do not provide very deep process functionality. This is mostly a tra-
deoff for the universality of the system.
Best-of-Breed
6
2. ERP S YSTEMS
Lite
Lite ERP systems are particularly popular by small businesses mainly
due to their reduced cost. A small company won’t utilize the huge
variety of services or deep process functionality that the two other
types mentioned above provide. It mostly has drawbacks as in not
containing basic functionality in some areas where it would be expec-
ted. Also it may prohibit the company in growth. In these cases, an
updated version or a complete new ERP system is acquired by the
firm.
Mobile ERP
Mobility is a big trend mainly due to the rapid spread of mobile de-
vices and their increased potential of providing enough computing
power along with ease of use. The potential of having real-time ac-
cess to information anywhere in the world is a great opportunity for
businesses to quickly embrace mobile ERP, which now can be used
not only for dashboards and reports, but also for conducting key bu-
siness processes.
Cloud ERP
The increasing popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS) licensing
and delivery model has moved information technology closer to the
cloud, where data is stored on remote centralized servers and is avai-
lable from any device connected to the World Wide Web. ERP sys-
tems also follow this trend and are starting to provide cloud and
SaaS solutions. Many users have shown signs of reluctance to place
7
2. ERP S YSTEMS
their data in the cloud, but the advantages of cloud ERP are beco-
ming more and more apparent and these reservations are gradually
disappearing.
Social ERP
Two-tier ERP
8
2. ERP S YSTEMS
Configuration
Customization
1. Software design model where functionally distinguishable aspects are not ar-
chitecturally separate components
2. Software design approach that subdivides a system into smaller parts called
modules
9
2. ERP S YSTEMS
Advantages
• License cost – Most of the open ERP systems come with one
of the open-source licenses6 such as GNU GPL (General Public
License) or BSD (Berkley Software Distribution) license, which
are free. This substantially lowers the initial cost, which on the
other hand shows not to be one of the most important criteria
for a company during a process of choosing a right ERP sys-
tem.
3. http://www.sap.com/solutions/business-suite/erp/index.epx
4. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/default.aspx
5. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/index.html
6. Licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition — allow software to be
freely used, modified, and shared
10
2. ERP S YSTEMS
Disadvantages
• The best and the brightest – This term is used to describe the
effect, where companies dedicate their most experienced IT
specialists who have the highest potential of quickly adapting
to their new role of implementing, customizing and maintai-
ning the ERP system. These employees often are accumulated
from other parts of the company, where they are valued for
their experience in their current field. The firm has to find su-
itable replacements for these employees. A different solution
would be to create a team of specialists who have previous
experience with the chosen ERP system. This is mostly not the
most effective choice, since qualified people are hard to find
and are expensive [8].
11
3 iDempiere
3.2 History
Although the first official alpha version of iDempiere was released
in the year 2012, its origin dates back all the way to 1999 when Jorg
Janke founded the open-source ERP system called Compiere2 . Its po-
pularity grew rapidly over the next few years, becoming one of the
most successful projects on the portal SourceForge.net3 . The commu-
nity backing the open-source ERP project was concerned about the
1. http://www.osgi.org
2. http://www.compiere.com
3. http://sourceforge.net - the most successful web-based source code repository
for open-source applications
12
3. I D EMPIERE
4. http://www.adempiere.com
5. http://wiki.idempiere.org/en/Windows_Installer
13
3. I D EMPIERE
6. http://wiki.idempiere.org/en/NF1.0_ImportCSV
7. http://www.zkoss.org
8. https://bitbucket.org/idempiere/idempiere
9. http://www.eclipse.org
10. http://wiki.idempiere.org/en/Installation_in_Eclipse
14
3. I D EMPIERE
3.5 Community
The iDempiere project is backed by a dynamic decentralized commu-
nity of developers and subject matter specialists that actively contri-
bute to the effort of keeping iDempiere a modern and up-to-date ERP
suite. Willingness and short response time are a major trait when in
need of information on any section of the system. Whether the user
needs solving an issue, gain deeper knowledge on the working of
a particular module or just general tips and tricks, the community
is the right place to visit. The main channels for connecting to the
community are:
• IRC Channel15
11. http://wiki.idempiere.org/en/Developing_Plug-Ins_-_Get_your_Plug-
In_running
12. http://wiki.idempiere.org/wiki/Main_Page
13. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/idempiere
14. http://www.globalqss.com/wiki/index.php/IDempiere/Full_Meeting_Minutes
15. http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=idempiere
15
4 E-Commerce
4.1 Introduction
This topic is best described and explained by defining terms that are
closely associated with it. Let us introduce the basic terminology:
Commerce – From the Latin word commercium which means trade
or exchange. According to Merriam-Webster’s electronic dictionary1 ,
commerce is defined as the exchange or buying and selling of com-
modities on a large scale involving transportation from place to place.
E-Commerce (or eCommerce) is the short form for Electronic Com-
merce, which is essentially traditional commerce utilizing the World
Wide Web for conducting one or more of its main components, which
range from advertising, buying and selling up to payment transac-
tion and delivery. It can also be described as a market strategy where
the company may or may not have a physical presence.
According to the way a company has adopted e-commerce, we
can distinguish three types of electronic marketing entry strategies
used today [10]:
1. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commerce
16
4. E-C OMMERCE
A similar term exists for companies which offer only physical sto-
res with no e-commerce involved whatsoever. The term used is Brick-
and-mortar.
4.2 History
Very early electronic commerce efforts were made available with the
introduction of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet and the
World Wide Web. It was essentially a non-organized communication
between a buyer and a seller subject carried out in an electronic, di-
gital form. The goods and payment were exchanged in person.
In 1979 the predecessor of online shopping was created by an En-
glish inventor called Michael Aldrich2 , who connected a television
set to a transaction processing computer with a telephone line. This
invention has received the name “teleshopping”, which means shop-
ping at a distance.
The year 1992 was the year when the first commercial sales web-
site was created by the company Book Stacks Unlimited. This was
made available by the World Wide Web service introduced two years
earlier. The website was registered under the domain www.books.com
and provided very basic e-shop functionality such as online products
selling and credit card processing.
The same year a book was published with the title Future Shop:
How New Technologies Will Change the Way We Shop and What We Buy.
It has predicted the coming electronic commerce revolution, displa-
yed a vision of future consumer empowerment and created a path-
way for new businesses that wanted to get involved in electronic
commerce [11].
In 1995, the United States National Science Foundation3 lifted its
former strict prohibition of commercial enterprises on the Internet,
which caused a tidal wave of companies entering the online market.
New and promising business ideas emerged rapidly, which lead to
the launching of various and very successful e-commerce products
2. http://www.aldricharchive.com/inventors_story.html
3. http://www.nsf.gov
17
4. E-C OMMERCE
4. http://www.amazon.com
5. http://www.ebay.com
18
5 Connecting ERP and e-commerce systems
5.1 Introduction
It is important to know that e-commerce tools and ERP suites are two
very different systems, which serve different purposes and are aimed
for a different group of users.
Enterprise resource planning systems are very complex software
products and were not intended for public consumption. The early
assumption was that the only people who work with the ERP sys-
tem are highly trained company employees, and the system was de-
signed and built in this fashion. This is beginning to change as cus-
tomers and suppliers are starting to get eager to also receive access
to the information stored in the company’s database, ranging from
more detailed product, manufacturer or billing information up to in-
ventory levels and order statuses. Along with this demand comes
the need to present the information in a form that the customer will
understand and have easy access to.
This creates a demand to introduce a new access channel in to
the ERP system designated for customers – a business-to-customer
model, which is often represented by incorporating an e-commerce
tool into the internal business processes of the company.
When integrating an electronic commerce solution, companies
owning a commercial ERP system have to rely on their vendor who
often can provide integration support for e-commerce tools, which
are however limited to a certain type and brand of software.
Open-source ERP systems can excel in this matter due to their
high configuration and extension potential.
One of the aspects that should be kept in mind during the ERP
and e-commerce integration is that the Internet never sleeps. This
means that the e-commerce tool should be fully functional and con-
tinuously available to the customers on the internet even when the
ERP system is undergoing maintenance or is otherwise not available.
While talking about e-commerce integration into ERP, it is impor-
tant to understand that these two systems should remain two sepa-
rate entities, but have to retain good communication potential. This
comes from the difference in nature of each product. E-commerce is
19
5. C ONNECTING ERP AND E - COMMERCE SYSTEMS
1. http://www.adempiere.com/Data_Import
2. http://wiki.idempiere.org/en/NF1.0_ImportCSV
20
5. C ONNECTING ERP AND E - COMMERCE SYSTEMS
Advantages
• If the connector installed is capable enough, and the needs of
the company are simple enough, the connection can be set up
and deployed in a matter of days.
Disadvantages
• The specificity of the connector is also its weak side in terms
of universability. If the company decides to deploy multiple
e-shops, a new connector must be applied.
21
5. C ONNECTING ERP AND E - COMMERCE SYSTEMS
5.2.3 Middleware
The second approach is to use middleware, most commonly ETL (ex-
tract, transform, and load) software.
These applications provide functionality that is able to integrate
data from multiple types of applications developed by different ven-
dors and/or hosted on separate hardware. It is an analogy to a soft-
ware translator, who takes information from the ERP system and
converts it into a format that the e-commerce tool can process. This
method also works in the opposite way.
22
5. C ONNECTING ERP AND E - COMMERCE SYSTEMS
Advantages
• Middleware software is available as a commercial product bac-
ked by experienced vendor companies, and also has easily ob-
tainable open-source instances
• ETL can be run as an application on a local computer or ne-
twork, or as a middleware service located on remote servers
and communicate via Internet
• Fluent data exchange once the configuration process is done
correctly
• High performance even as remote services
• Lower programming effort is needed, since the middleware
application handles a reasonably high fraction of the commu-
nication automatically
Disadvantages
• Increased maintenance due to involving a third party to the
communication process
• Difficult and time consuming process of the initial configura-
tion
• Possible operational problems can occur when the software is
not properly set-up or designed due to its complexity
3. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/data-
integration/enterprise-edition/overview/index.html
4. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-
0411simchuk
5. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms141026.aspx
6. http://www.talend.com/resource/free-etl.html
7. http://etl-tools.info
8. http://www.jitterbit.com/solutions/etl-data-integration
23
5. C ONNECTING ERP AND E - COMMERCE SYSTEMS
5.3 Summary
There are many currently available ways to integrate electronic stores
into their ERP systems. Companies can choose between commercial
or open-source, ETL or data connectors. Each approach is very speci-
fic and has its own set advantages and disadvantages. One common
disadvantage is the somewhat low level of universality the currently
available tools and applications provide. This is why I have decided
to develop eConnect, which brings a slightly different approach to
this topic.
24
6 eConnect
The main goal of this diploma thesis is to design and implement ex-
tended functionality for iDempiere which will allow companies run-
ning the ERP system to actively utilize e-commerce solutions in the
form of electronic stores for their business activities. A substantial
focus is placed on the aspect of universality of the developed tool.
eConnect is a tool that provides bi-directional communication ca-
pability between iDempiere and a variety of electronic stores. The
main difference from other products that offer similar functionality
is a level of e-shop platform independence. This is achieved by app-
lying different data exchange rules to different e-shop connections.
This ability is however not unlimited and relies on the target soft-
ware’s functional capabilities. What requirements must the electronic
store meet to be able to establish a full communication potential will
be described in the later parts of this document.
eConnect is realized as a plug-in for iDempiere. This form of im-
plementation was chosen to comply with one of the basic require-
ments, which is ease of use. No necessity was present to involve an
external third party tool, which would operate as a part of the e-shop
software or as a standalone application. The company’s employees
should be used to work with iDempiere on a regular basis, and an
introduction to a different tool would be time consuming and contra
productive.
The main functional aspects of eConnect are initial data popula-
tion and subsequent bi-directional data synchronization, which can
be done on a regular basis.
25
6. E C ONNECT
26
6. E C ONNECT
27
6. E C ONNECT
Obr. 6.1: Diagram showing how the three systems store data related
to product categories
This document will be representing the parent system, table and field
information in the standard SQL notation, which looks like this:
<database_name>.<table_name>.<column_name>
Similarities
The tables oscommerce.categories and oscommerce.categories_description,
opencart.category and opencart.category_description and the single idem-
piere.m_product_category have the same purposes in their respective
systems and fully share these five attributes:
28
6. E C ONNECT
29
6. E C ONNECT
These are the five attributes that compose the minimal set of infor-
mation that is needed to create a basic category representation in the
osCommerce e-shop. These however are not sufficient for OpenCart,
which also requires the attribute status to be present.
30
6. E C ONNECT
Default values
Unused attributes
31
6. E C ONNECT
are unused. These columns are not useful for the e-shop to function
properly and thus do not need to be exported. In the case of an im-
port process, the attributes will not be able to be populated by the
data from the electronic store since it does not possess them. The use
of a variable default value would be beneficial, and in some cases
mandatory.
Analysis results
This example was chosen to illustrate the principle of connecting in-
formation throughout the systems due to the high similarity of the
data tables and their attributes. Such a high commonality level is ho-
wever not present in all cases. Product and order data for example
are a lot more complex. Also different e-shops can have very compli-
cated category representations.
After analyzing the commonalities within the data storage archi-
tectures of numerous electronic stores, the resulting information was
compared to iDempiere and the way it stores its data. As a result,
a connection method was designed to establish a bi-directional ERP
and e-shop communication based on data exchange settings created
for specific system pairs.
The data exchange settings consist of:
• Default values for cases when one side is not able to provide
the needed data
32
7 Implementation
The implementation process of eConnect can be divided into these
four steps:
33
7. I MPLEMENTATION
34
7. I MPLEMENTATION
35
7. I MPLEMENTATION
1. The AD Engine is the base component of iDempiere, which allows most of its
application to be configured directly in the dictionary without requiring compila-
tion or re-building
36
7. I MPLEMENTATION
After repeating these steps for each of the custom tables, iDempiere
will enable their data management in a new dedicated user interface
window.
A more detailed guide on how to register tables can be found in
the iDempiere wiki pages [9] or in the ADempiere 3.6 Cookbook [12].
37
7. I MPLEMENTATION
Classes EExport<data_type>
The EExport classes extend the org.compiere.process.SvrProcess class in
order to be able to execute their functionality as an iDempiere pro-
cess2 . They inherit two abstract methods which require implementa-
tion: prepare() and doIt().
Method doIt() - As the name of the method may indicate, its pur-
pose is to execute the functionality it contains after being called by
the iDempiere process. In the case of the export classes, this method
executes a series of individual tasks which can be divided into these
main groups:
2. http://wiki.idempiere.org/en/Developing_Plug-Ins_-_Process
38
7. I MPLEMENTATION
– getEShopSettingsByEShopID(...)
– getEShopDatabaseConnectionSettingsByDatabaseID(...)
– getEShopExportSettingsByType(...)
39
7. I MPLEMENTATION
After the operations have been executed, the method returns a string
object which is then displayed in the process result window in iDem-
piere. The outcome of this process can be seen in the database of the
electronic store, which is now populated with the most recent data
from iDempiere.
Classes EImport<data_type>
Same as the EExport classes, the EImport classes also extend the
org.compiere.process.SvrProcess and inherit two abstract methods:
prepare() and doIt(). There are only two differences in functionality
between EExport and EImport classes:
40
7. I MPLEMENTATION
be inserted into the corresponding working table. This is the first and
automated phase of the import process.
Registering processes
To enable the user to execute any of the previously implemented
processes, they must first be registered in the iDempiere Application
Dictionary. This is achieved by following these steps:
41
7. I MPLEMENTATION
Class ModelMethods
This static class comprises of methods which are dedicated to data-
base communication only. Their functionality ranges from returning
the target database connection object to providing result sets of vari-
ous queries used in the import and export processes.
Class SQLBuilder
This class enables to create SQLBuilder objects which are capable of
storing detailed query information and provides SQL query creation
methods. The most important methods from this class are:
42
8 Testing and Deployment
This resolves not only the single case of Name and Surname but mul-
tiple other possible cases.
43
8. T ESTING AND D EPLOYMENT
44
8. T ESTING AND D EPLOYMENT
• OpenCart 1.4.9.3
• osCommerce 2.3.3.4
• VirtueMart 2.0.2.4
• Woocommerce 2.1.8
• Drupal 7.28
• Magento 1.9.0.0
Results
According of complexity of the tested electronic stores, they can be
divided into three groups:
• Symplistic - The stores that fall into this category are Virtu-
eMart and Woocommerce. Both are designed as plug-ins for
a content management system (CMS). The database design of
these two stores is very symplistic in order to be able to work
together with the Joomla (VirtueMart) or Wordpress (Woocom-
merce) CMS platform. Since iDempiere requires certain data
to be available when performing data import or migration,
such as country or currency identificators, none of the men-
tioned CMS plug-in based electronic stores provide this func-
tionality and thus is not suported by the communication form
which eConnect provides.
It is however possible to artificially recreate the required mis-
sing data by assigning it a default value in the data exchange
settings, but this would not be a flexible and thus suitable so-
lution.
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8. T ESTING AND D EPLOYMENT
46
8. T ESTING AND D EPLOYMENT
• Pick the correct price list. This will impact the prices of the
imported products
47
8. T ESTING AND D EPLOYMENT
Data maintenance
Most of the data maintenance is done via iDempiere which minima-
lizes the interaction needed with the electronic store. If a product is
changed or a new one is added, simply run the correct synchroni-
zation process which will import or update the new product in the
e-shop database. The changes will be seen immediately by refreshing
the store application.
Synchronization processes are available for many other data ty-
pes, such as categories, countries, orders or payments.
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9 Conclusion
In the recent years, e-commerce systems are slowly but surely ma-
king their way into close integration with ERP. A customer oriented
firm is generally more successful than a profit oriented firm, and the
business is well aware of that. This is why many companies started
to deploy the Business-to-Customer strategy, and those who haven’t
will most probably follow.
There are many solutions on the market which provide electronic
commerce and ERP connection capabilities. Each has its own list of
advantages and disadvantages. Choosing the most suitable e-com-
merce system for a company is a similarly difficult process as the
selection of the perfect ERP system. It depends on dozens of factors
that need to be taken into account, and no solution is the best for
everyone since each company is so very different from the other.
The software which was developed as a result of this diploma the-
sis is not meant to be a breakthrough in its field. It is meant to provide
an alternative solution for smaller companies that do not want or
don’t have the means to implement one of the available commercial
solutions. It also gives an opportunity to try out less known electro-
nic store platforms which in other cases would not be supported by
the popular ERP to e-commerce connection tools.
As an open-source software, eConnect provides an opportunity
for developers to adopt its concept and allows them to further extend
it by adding their own ideas and experiences, which may one time
result in a truly universal and popular solution to the business needs
of many companies.
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10 Electronic attachments
This thesis also includes electronic attachments that are uploaded
into the MU IS. They consist of:
50
11 Literature
[6] DREW, Robb. Top 8 ERP Trends for 2014 [online]. Last mo-
dified on December 20, 2013. [cit. May 2014]. Available from
World Wide Web: <http://www.enterpriseappstoday.
com/erp/top-8-erp-trends-for-2014.html>.
[8] CHEN, Injazz. Planning for ERP systems: analysis and future
trends. Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 7 No. 5, 2011,
pp. 374-86.
51
11. L ITERATURE
[11] SNIDER, J.H. and ZYPORIN, Terra. Future Shop: How New
Technologies Will Change The Way We Shop and What We Buy.
2008. ISBN 978-0-59550-363-6
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