(Source: IEEE Computer Society) When someone says enterprise resource planning (ERP), most IT professionals think of the expensive, complex, and difficult-to-implement commercial products that were the rage a few years ago. Although many large corporations did reap tremendous cost savings from the implementation of such systems, an average implementation cost counted in the millions of dollars; this has prevented ERP systems from spreading to small and medium-sized businesses. After ERP deployment, its "blackbox" nature prevents from understanding and eventually improving the business processes it implements, leaving some important business decisions to the software publisher rather than to the corporate manager, preventing scientific researchers from getting involved in management innovation.

This situation provides much of the motivation for our architecture, ERP5, which offers several advantages for business. All ERP5 tools are open source, so are free and have openly available source code that a business can change to suit its processes. ERP5 incorporates, from scratch, advanced concepts such as object-oriented databases, a content management system, synchronization, variations, workflows, and a method to model and implement business processes. ERP5 is also a Web site where researchers can share innovation on management techniques and their implementation through software.

In 2001, two companies initiated the ERP5 project: Nexedi, a Zope service provider in France (Zope is a well-known open-source application server), and Coramy, a European apparel manufacturer. They aimed to develop a set of ERP software components for small and medium-sized companies. In addition to source code, the project also produced educational material and a clearly defined theoretical model. To fit the needs of smaller companies, they also designed ERP5 for distribution across distant sites with slow and unreliable Internet connections.

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