With the use of a professional ERP platform (formerly OpenERP), small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular can use a free community edition as well as a commercial version or software-as-a-service models to provide high-quality enterprise resource planning functionalities (ERP ) to benefit greatly from a fully integrated business solution.

Enterprise resource planning systems (ERP).    Modern ERP systems offer a large number of fully integrated components from a single source in order to meet all the needs of modern business processes in a generic way in the form of a scalable online system.  By using modern web technologies, such an ERP system is generally much more convenient to use and faster to learn than many traditional business management systems.

Alternative to SAP. This ranges from modules for project management to time recording, absence management, recruiting, inventory management to a complete editor for the comfortable creation of websites without programming knowledge as well as e-learning components as well as options for creating complete online shops and manage.  Due to the seamless integration of all essential business processes in a central business system, numerous existing IT systems can generally be replaced with the use of professional ERP systems.  This alone pays off the use of an ERP system and the development of your own ERP modules and components, usually after a very short time.

Open source.   Since the beginning of development, OpenERP (and its successor) has always been developed as an open source project and even today most of the framework is still made available as free software, although in the meantime some of the modules are only commercially available.  Overall, however, the free Community Edition also offers an impressive range of functions and can be easily expanded at any time.