How's it compare with Apache OFBiz and the things people are building on top of that?
Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
61–70 of 161 posts
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#62First off, congrats, this is no small feat, well done. A question: in my (limited) experience, ERPs are made on the basis of integrations. I'd have thought the best priority order would be data-model first, integration second, everything else third. How do you think about this? What's the goal here? And secondly, some feedback: It looks like Carbon falls into the same trap as many self-hostable SaaS-like products (in…
> Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy Perhaps this could be addressed by providing a Pulumi or Terraform program?
It's not just about the initial deployment, although these may help. If you're running Wordpress, the question "why is it slow" is pretty limited in scope – you need a faster webserver, database, or maybe need those two to be closer to each other. A simplification but not much of one. For this, is it the app server, the task queue, or one of several other components, or is it in the Supabase layer, or is it a dependency that someone else runs... etc.
Figuring out issues get more complex, scaling gets more complex, backup and recovery get more complex, now you need monitoring for it all too, and with many services the complexity multiplies.
All of that complexity is somewhat justified for a team that exists to build and operate the system (i.e. SaaS), but doesn't really work for a team who exist to build something else and have just been tasked with operating this.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#63For me this is a space that has been long dominated by MRPeasy--it's just such a perfect fit. Happy to see open source solutions slowly catching up.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#64How's it compare with Apache OFBiz and the things people are building on top of that?
Wow how have I never heard of OFBiz? I’ve been keeping an eye out for a good self hosted erp forever and thought ERPnext was as good as it gets but this sounds super.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#65What exactly is an “ERP”? Virtually everything I read about them or on the website of products, is so vague and broad that it sounds like “it’s everything”. How would a business know they need this product? For the big ERPs out there, is there a clear guide with screenshots that show what they concretely do?
Basically the core functionality is to track inventory, manage purchase orders in, and sales orders out. Generally that's also linked to accounting so basically as you buy and sell stuff everything is linked to your accounting ledgers. Then there's MRP (M for manufacturing) which is usually an option - for when stuff that you're selling isn't the same as what you're buying. So the ERP/MRP manages bills of materials f…
The M is for “material”. Material Resource Planning.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I mean, like a copilot style AI assistant, the user can chat with to ask what they want to do, and either the assistant can operate and navigate the UI to the right place, or perhaps even shortcut the steps for the user by asking for questions to satisfy inputs for the thing they are trying to accomplish. An example: - user intent is to update an attribute for a component part number A21445 - user can click a cha…
really appreciate you taking the time to write this! we've started trying to work through adding agents like this: https://x.com/barbinbrad/status/1903047303180464586 the trouble is that there are 1000s of possible mutations -- and the quality of an agent tends to diminsh with the amount of "tools" you give it. i need to figure out the right abstraction for this.
I pray you focus on your core product and don’t fall into an agentification rabbit hole.
If you do want everything to be automatable take a page from Blender and give every action a key binding plus a Python method, so Python scripts can take the same actions a human would, but as function calls instead of clicks. Then maybe maybe maybe you can have a text field that allows natural language to transform to an action, but please god stay away from chat interfaces.
Rhino CAD is another interesting interface to look at, there’s a million buttons and menus but there’s also a text field at the top of the viewport where you can just type a command if you already know the name instead of rummaging through submenus. Kind of a CLI within the GUI.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#67Hm, interesting. With how slow the testimonial carousel on the web page is though, I don't have much confidence that Carbon is performant either. How many pieces of that (frankly massive) techstack require dedicated network trips?
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#68This is all cool but i think traditional erp systems are going to get eaten away by software like Optifye.ai, using vision for counting, and then certifying through manual data entry. If there’s no Vision integrated into your erp, you’ll get eaten away by competitors who run faster lean teams through using such systesm
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#69I am setting up a large manufacturing operation now.
Red flags with your site are: (a) seems to assume a sales order based process; (b) seems to assume B2C sales via Stripe; (c) has a huge bunch of layers but no actual user view.
I would suggest beginning your page with "Assumptions". In there, list all the things you have assumed.
Then I would suggest having a section for each area: ERP, MES, whatever, with a screenshot or two and a quick table based comparison vs. other tools.
Finally, include something about the layers you used and what they do. Nobody really cares about that stuff, it's almost developer documentation rather than user documentation.
Re: Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years
#70Is this a kind of developer BINGO? ;-)
"Techstack Remix – framework Typescript – language Tailwind – styling Radix UI - behavior Supabase - database Supabase – auth Upstash - cache Trigger - jobs Resend – email Novu – notifications Vercel – hosting Stripe - billing"
And no joke: congrats to your product!