Startups and more established organisations seeking a complete end-to-end solution for managing their e-Commerce website that is completely synchronised with their back office operations such as Finance, Accounting, Marketing, HR and Sales, have something to cheer about. Open Labs has developed an API called OpenERP Connector, which integrates OpenERP and Magento, allowing users to synchronise data across both platforms thereby reducing the need for maintaining two separate systems that use the same product and customer data.
Before delving deeper into the benefits of this integration, a review of OpenERP and Magento is in order. OpenERP is an open source ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software released under the AGPL license, currently available as version 7.0. This package provides all of the standard features available in traditional licensed ERP software and includes modules such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Resources, Procurement, Sales, Marketing, Finance and Accounting etc. On the other side of the equation, Magento is a feature-rich, open source e-commerce web application that allows its users to easily develop customised solutions for their e-commerce websites. Magento includes modules that help in marketing, catalogue management, search engine optimization and mobile accessibility, which is in addition to its standard feature offering of an e-commerce checkout functionality. One can easily see the benefits of combining the power of the two platforms, since both the customer-facing and back office operations are strongly inter-related and dependent on each other in any business, including those classified as e-commerce.
A bridge between OpenERP and Magento, such as the OpenERP Connector, gives the following benefits:
1. Users no longer have to enter product data separately across both platforms – they can be easily imported/exported to either application according to user requirements.
2. Customer interactions on a Magento-based website can be easily copied into OpenERP, giving the user the capability to use OpenERP’s features on the same set of data. For example, if a user selects a product, puts it into his shopping cart and checks out (a Magento feature), the data about this sales order can be easily copied into OpenERP using this bridge. This can easily be extended to other ERP modules as well.
3. Since both Magento and OpenERP are open source platforms, using them results in significant cost savings over licensed applications.
To sum up in one line: Integrating Magento and OpenERP helps users avoid the hassle of repetitively adding the same product data across two powerful platforms, resulting in greater productivity. Sales and purchases, along with financial data, can be linked, viewed and manipulated within the ERP, and native and add-on Business Intelligence tools can be used to answer key business questions, and provide useful metrics in the interest of constant improvement.
Download for OpenERP connector is available on Magento’s website.
A tutorial on how to integrate OpenERP with Magento is available on OpenLabs’ blog.