It is wonderful to be here in Barcelona, Spain for the Openbravo World Conference which begins today. I had some free time yesterday, and I took full advantage by renting a bicycle and cruising around the city. Barcelona is more magnificent than I remember, and this is definitely a great city to see by bike (I actually always prefer to see any and all cities by bicycle). I was here in 1992 as a backpacker and had the added bonus back then of getting to see a number of events at the Summer Olympics (including the original Dream Team play Nigeria) held here that year.
Myself and our CTO, Fernando Ontiveros, are both here for the conference (and so are some of our Danish partners from Xcompetence - IB and Kathe). I’ll be delivering a presentation in the Community Building section of the OBWC on Sunday afternoon at 2:30 pm where ProcessMaker will be officially announcing its integration module with Openbravo’s ERP software. It took us a few months for Fernando and his team to really get their heads around the Openbravo software and how we should integrate ProcessMaker with it, but the results are fantastic!
I will be talking about how Openbravo partners can expand their business by looking for BPM opportunities where ProcessMaker can be applied in existing and new ERP implementations. BPM and ERP fit together perfectly and it is our experience that a company that is investing in ERP will almost invariably need custom workflow routing capability to enhance their ERP experience. We have a number of customers that have integrated ProcessMaker with other ERP software including SAP and Great Plains. Openbravo is a particularly great fit though because they use an open source license (they use OBPL a version of the Mozilla license) as does ProcessMaker (we use the AGPLv3).
We will be doing a demo of an Expense Report and Time Sheet Custom Approval Process. This is a classic case where many companies need advanced workflow functionality that their ERP software simply does not provide. In Openbravo, for example, you can declare expense report expenditures and you can issue reimbursements, but you cannot manage a workflow which allows an employee to declare expenses, route them to his/her manager for approval, and then route it to finance for reimbursement approval. So, in our integration with Openbravo, we begin the expense report by pulling in fields from Openbravo related to types of expense categories and other information already in Openbravo, then we route the form to a manager for approval, and then once it is approved, the expenses show up in Openbravo so that they can be registered for payment.
We are proud to have the ProcessMaker-Openbravo listed as one of the first modules on the openbravo forge. We are sure that this new forge is going to become very popular.
Here you can see a video of how the integration works courtesy of our own Marketing Guru, Amy Wyron.
Well, looking forward to the conference, some great seafood tapas, and of course a healthy (if not excessive) amount of Sangria (in the evenings, of course).