Logic Works

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About Us

About Logic Works Ltd

Logic Works was incorporated in 1997 as a limited liability vehicle for the development of the original code base of webERP. The webERP code became open-source in January 2003. Subsequently, there have been many contributors particularly in the last few years as more experienced developers have joined the project. Logic Works continues to be actively involved in developing webERP and looking for efficient ways to administer and manage businesses in general.

One of the difficulties for a business considering adopting open-source software is the lack of accountability that is implicit in volunteer based development activities such as webERP. By having a commercial support option available for webERP it is hoped that Logic Works Ltd can provide the accountability that may be necessary for some companies in making their decision.

 

History of Logic Works & webERP

Where Did it Come From

Working as an accountant in commercial entities using ERP software and understanding the real benefits of what can be achieved with a truly integrated system is not without its frustrations.

One business in particular ran software that was buggy and it was a daily battle daily to reconcile general ledger to stock and debtors to general ledger. Stock quantities on hand never agreed to the movements, sales analysis didn't tie up to sales totals in the general ledger etc. It was necessary to effectively reverse engineer the logic to describe to the developer how to fix it, without access to the code. It occurred that access to the code would have made this process so much easier.

The carnage created by this buggy software cost this organisation dearly not only in the wasted effort to debug the code that had been paid for already but also and perhaps more painfully in incorrect information and decisions made based on incorrect data. There had to be a better way. Learning about software development was born out of the desire to run the business more efficiently and unlock the potential of computing to minimise the labour of business administration and provide information to make appropriate decisions.

Logic Works was incorporated in 1997 as a limited liability vehicle for the distribution of a Microsoft Access based ERP system. This was originally a pure Microsoft Access application – but multi-user issues soon became evident and the heavy network requirements for a multi-user system using Microsoft Access made this a difficult application to run reliably. The application was originally developed on Access 2. Only a short foray into Access 95 was necessary to make a re-evaluation necessary. So work was undertaken to supplement the Microsoft Access front end with a Microsoft SQL Server back end. The system was almost entirely re-written using SQL Server stored procedures to ensure the processing load was on the server hardware rather than transferring the data to the client Access machine and then back. The SQL Server version was not widely distributed. The SQL Server system was significantly more functional than webERP is today including contract costing and manufacturing had full MRP. It was developed for and used extensively for plastics manufacturing with preferred machine loading and capacity requirements planning capabilities. The idea of converting the front end to visual basic was toyed with to avoid the requirement for the MS Access front end but ultimately, the benefits were not convincing. The logic of having the processing all done at the server with very little dependence on client software makes good sense. How then to make graphical application without a large client application?

A new approach was needed. Realisation of this fact coincided with exposure to SuSE Linux in 1998. At a time when server software in the form of NT Server had some real issues, SuSE was a revalation. As a way to provide robust, efficient, low cost server functionality for file sharing, email, proxy server and web-server. The richness and flexibility of the software available for the platform inspired me as did the free availability of free development tools. Development tools that didn't swamp the CPU or memory and worked on windows Unix or linux. In particular the platform presented by Apache, MySQL and PHP – with Linux running this platform now widely referred to as the LAMP platform. Solutions developed on this platform were:

  1. Robust

  2. Fast

  3. Required minimal investment in infrastructure to run them

  4. Incurred only minimal load on server resources

The choice of development tools was therefore much more considered than the early infatuation with MS Access and SQL Server. Work on webERP began in 2000 and the logic used in the MS Access based system formed the basis for webERP. Much had been learned about normalised database design as the basis for an efficient application and programming for scalability. The already highly normalised table design was originally converted from the SQL Server tables to MySQL using a small utility. The first release was not until December 2003. As at the time of writing webERP has had over 130,000 downloads, with a loyal and active following and now consistently ranks in the top 20 OSS projects on sourceforge and has received wide acclaim from many experienced professionals.