Heres another success story od a small business migrating to an open source enterprise application and reaping the benefits, this time it is Moline Bearing manufactures and sells metal bearings from its factory in St. Charles, Ill., and its warehouses in Mississippi, Texas, Colorado, and California.

David Fauntleroy isn't just the owner; he is the sole IT person at Moline. He started the conversion to OpenMFG in early 2004, tested it for five months, and today uses it to run the entire business: accounting, production, purchasing, and inventory. "The biggest hurdle was that I wanted to bring over as much information as I could from our old system," he says. "That proved to be a pretty daunting task considering you couldn't directly get it out of the database." He ended up manually converting the data to spreadsheets and using Microsoft Access to finally load it into OpenMFG.

OpenMFG, is an ERP and accounting package that is built around the PostgreSQL open source database. OpenMFG is not true open source software, according to the OSI's definition, but OpenMFG the company provides source code to customers, allowing them to modify the program as they see fit, as long as they do not redistribute or sell the modified code without permission from OpenMFG.

Source: NewsForgePrashanth RaiTag(s): Small Biz, Open Source, Migration.