ERPNext Customer Story: Tritorc Equipment, Thane

We at ERPNext started a new culture of "getting out of the building" some time back, which simply means leaving the comfort zone of communicating with clients via emails or phone calls and meeting up with them face to face to get feedbacks, suggestions and to know each other better.

My colleague Neil and I visited our client Tritorc Equipment Pvt. Ltd.(formerly known as Tristar International), Thane, Maharashtra on 25th July, 2016. They are one of the leaders in the manufacturing and marketing of industrial tools in India. They produce tools for industries like Automobiles, Railways, Machine Tools, Thermal Power Plants, Turbine manufacture and maintenance, Atomic Power Plants, Petrochemicals, Oil Industry, Cement Plants, Construction and General Engineering Industry etc. to name just a few.

They have been using ERPNext for a few months now and they use ERPNext in their office as well as in their manufacturing unit. They have 16 users and 80% of their work is done on ERPNext. They told us one tab of ERPNext is always open on their computers. 

It was a 3 hours long session with various users from different departments using different modules of ERPNext. Their IT Head Pratibha Patil has extensively tested most of the modules of EPRNext and others stick to the modules they use. Mostly used modules are:

1.    Buying
2.    Selling
3.    Stock
4.    BOM
5.    HR (Work in progress)

We got a positive feedback on ease of use of ERPNext and navigation within the system, we have received similar kind of feedback time and again that ERPNext is much simpler to use as compared to other ERP Systems.

Suggestions

We got lots of suggestions as well. Some were generic and some were specific to their business model. I have listed some of them below.

1.    Concept of Advance Salary
2.    Overtime calculations based on Salary
3.    Management of TDS (Tax Deducted at Source)
4.    Late Delivery Charges - Customer pays less than the invoice in case of late delivery
5.    Service as Order Type
6.    Manage service item billing using Timesheet
7.    Timesheet against Item (Equipment/Machine) for leasing/renting
8.    Inactive Item Report
9.    Better Indicator (Color coding)
10.    Customizable weightage to Tasks in Project
11.    Fixed Asset value management. For example, if you upgrade it, its value increases.
12.    Multiple leads against the same company and same address.
13.    Better default values - Ability to define default values.

Where is your source code?

This question triggered a very interesting conversation with the Director of Tristar International. They actually thought like any other SAAS (Software as a Service), our source code is also hidden in some closet. We made them understand what open source is. They were pretty impressed but also worried that maybe it won't always be open source. We assured them "EPRNext will always be an open source ERP". We explained to them how they are free to customize our code to their need and how they can even contribute it back to help the whole community. 

So you are building a social network kind of thing?

We very proudly told them that we have a great community who are so active on our forum (https://discuss.erpnext.com/). People ask questions and they get very prompt replies not just from us but from other community members. We also have a chat forum and we try to write blogs now and then on new developments to keep our community member in the loop. We already have a strong ERPNext social network. 

These kind of exposures are great as you understand the client's business model and their use cases better, and you can present your side of the story as well. I think being a developer, it is sometimes important to directly know the requirement from the client rather than they being fed to you indirectly. Plus it breaks the clichè that Software Developers are introverted geeks.