Introduction

For some years. the impact of IT systems on businesses competitiveness has become more and more apparent. Initially, re-occuring business tasks where automated. Soon software tools optimized day to day activities within the company. Today, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software systems are at the center of gaining a competitive advantage for many organisations.

Departmental base organizations, that are vertically structured, are intergrating their business processes in response to the need to be nimble, reliable and quick. To anticipate the markets needs. Employees need to understand each others task and continuesly communicate with each other to work efficiently together.

A common understanding between departments is needed. A clear set of practices, a methology. An ERP system is an ideal tool for providing this common understanding between departments. However, there are also inherint risks and costs associated with an ERP system intergration.

Large ERP system vendors have yet to balance the power of ERP with the simplicity expected from the end user. This has lead to an explosion of consultants and experts to help companies run their ERP systems. All very well for the corporates & fortune 500s, but not very attractive for the small to medium enterprises (SMEs).

Given the running costs of many of these ERP systems, added to that the licencing fees and set-up costs, and it is easy to see why less the 5% of SMEs enjoy the benefits of an ERP system.

The Open Source software & business models have offered solutions to some of these problems. To make ERP systems accessible to SMEs we need to do a number of things.

Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the system
Create an intuitive product that is still powerfull in intergrating the departments of a company

Open Source reduces the TCO by removing the intermediary (distributor). Development costs are reduced thanks to the reuse of other Open Source components. Publishing of the software under the GPL licence significantly reduces the commercial & marketing costs.

The Open Source model also helps create and intuitive product that is still powerfull in intergrating the departments of a company. By allowing free interaction between thousands of contributors and partenres, the product is guided by may minds with a lot of experience. No one person can be a specialist in every field. By alowing the interaction and guidance, the product benefits from the insight of numerous domain specialists, including accountants, IT proffesionals, salesmen, marketing specialists, ISO9001 consultants, etc.

What is better than a worldwide network of partners and contributors, each making contributions in the area of their expertiese. Through out this book, it will become apparent that when these contributions form industry experts are well organized, the results exceed our expectations.

The real challenge is to develop a soultion that is simple, felxible and as complete as possiable. To reach this quality level, we need a leader able to organize all these activities.

Therefore, the development team at Tiny is responsiable for the organization, synchronization and consistency of the Tiny ERP system.