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Foreword

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Information Systems have played an increasingly visible role over the past several years in improving the competitiveness of business. More than just tools for handling repetitive tasks, they are used to guide and advance all of a company's daily activities. Integrated management software is today very often a key source of significant competitive advantage.

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The standard response to a need for responsiveness, reliability, and rapidly increasing expectations is to create an organization based on departments with a clear linear structure, integrated around your operating processes. To increase efficiency amongst salespeople, accountants, logistics staff and everyone else you should have a common understanding of your problems.

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For this you need a common language for shared references, policies and communication. An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system provides the ideal platform for this common reference point.

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Open Source software at the Service of Management

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Risks and integration costs are important barriers to all the advantages you gain from such systems. That's why, today, few small- and medium-sized companies use ERP. In addition, the larger ERP vendors such as SAP, Microsoft and Oracle have not been able to reconcile the power and comprehensive cover of an ERP system with the simplicity and flexibility wanted by the users. But this is exactly what small and medium enterprises are looking for.

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The development processes of Open Source Software, and the new business models adopted by their developers, provide a new way of resolving such cost and quality issues for this kind of enterprise software.

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To make an ERP system fully available to small and medium enterprises, cost reduction is the first priority. Open source software makes it possible to greatly reduce development costs by aggressive reuse of open source software libraries; to eliminate intermediaries (the distributors), with all of their expensive sales overhead; to cut out selling costs by free publication of the software; and to considerably reduce the marketing overhead.

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Since there is open interaction among thousands of contributors and partners working on the same project, the quality of the resulting software greatly benefits from the scrutiny. And you cannot be everything at once: accountant, software developer, salesperson, ISO 9001 quality professional, specialist in agricultural products, expert in the customs and habits of pharmaceutical vendors, just as a start.

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Faced with these wide-ranging requirements, what could be better than a worldwide network of partners and contributors? Every single person adds own contributions according to his or her professional competence. Throughout this book you will see that the results exceed any reasonable expectations when such work is well organized.