THE PARTICIPANTS

The Customer – Al Amer Group Electrical Materials

Al Amer Group was established in 1997 as a general trading company. It first acquired South Trading & Contracting Co. in the same year and over more than 25 years grew into a group of diverse companies mainly through expansion projects. Today Al Amer Group operates subsidiaries in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Al Amer Group Electrical Materials is a subsidiary company in the Al Amer Group that specializes in trading in electrical materials, manufacturing switchgears and executing MEP contracts. This case study is about implementing Etendo ERP by Promantia Business Solutions at Al Amer Group Electrical Materials.

The Product – Etendo

The product, Etendo, was originally developed as Openbravo ERP by Openbravo. S.L.U When Openbravo, which had a strong presence in both the ERP and Retail spaces, decided to focus only on Retail, it divested its ERP product to FutIT Service a company in Spain. The product was renamed as Etendo. FutITT enhanced the Etendo product by adding not just functional features but also a mobile front-end, and an integration with Microsoft Power BI  They are also working on a new customizable user interface and a set of AI tools ( starting with Etendo Copilot). 

The Service Provider – Promantia

Promantia Business Solutions ( Promantia ) is a consulting and ERP implementation and maintenance company based in Bangalore, India focusing on Open Source Business Solutions. Promantia has, over 15 years, worked with ERP products like Openbravo, Etendo, and, ERPNext as well as other Opensource Business Applications like Magento, Prestashop (E-commerce), SugarCRM (CRM)  and, Pentaho ( Document management ) 

THE DRIVERS FOR ETENDO ERP

Al Amer successfully implemented OpenbravoERP with Promantia as the Implementation Partner in 2013 and has been using it since then. They had customized the ERP over time to meet their specific requirements and Promantia continued to maintain the ERP for them

When Openbravo announced the discontinuation of it’s ERP service Al-Amer was keen to move to Etendo given the ease of migration from Openbravo as well as the ability to retain the customisations done on Openbravo as well as the new features that Etendo had. They were also pleased with the new features that were being added to Etendo over the original Openbravo version 

THE IMPLEMENTATION

Promantia, which had already trained on the Etendo product and taken a partnership with Etendo,  took up the ERP implementation early ( Sept. 2022 ) as this was their first Etendo implementation. Most of the technology were familiar to the Promantia team, however, they spent a lot of time on testing and some time in deployment scripting to ensure a smooth implementation. Etendo also helped out when a few issues were available. Since this was a migration from Openbravo the implementation was a technical exercise. Promantia moved the test instance to the version of Openbravo that was supported by Etendo for migration and ran migration scripts, using Etendo’s guidance whenever they had any issues.

The customer did an acceptance test on the test environment and after Promantia addressed feedback from the UAT, they went live on 17th Dec 2022 in time for the deadline of 31-12-2022 that was planned. As the customer was already familiar with Openbravo, they were able to easily move to using Etendo,  and there were very few issues, which were promptly addressed.

LOOKING AHEAD

The customer in 2024 is looking to upgrade the product and try out the new features that Etendo offers.

CUSTOMER QUOTE

“The positive attitude the team(Promantia) has towards its clients is commendable they listen to the requirements and try to come up with solutions and take criticism and feedback positively”

                                                                                                                                   Abdullah Qureshi,  Accountant ( and ERP Champion ) at Al Amer