The Beginning

 

By the late 1980's, the German multinational enterprise software company SAP was looking for ways to migrate its ERP R/2 product to a client-server architecture, but in addition it wanted to build a multidimensional ERP, which meant deploying a multi-company, multi-language and multi-currency enterprise software among other things. In order to achieve this, they hired external advice from a German company called ADV/Orga, where Jorg Janke worked as software architect.

Jorg's recommendation was to rewrite R/2 which would have put in place the required multidimensional features and as such conquered the world of ERP solutions. However SAP's decision at the end involved adding more layers to the core ERP programming structures, which in turn created inefficiencies and complexities that even today subsist on most SAP implementations and other ERP software as well.

After this period, Jorg Janke held other important positions with other well-known ERP vendors, until he managed to get some financing from a multinational tire manufacturer Goodyear where he was retained to develop a custom ERP that will leverage multidimensional functionality, and will allow easy customizations based on design principles that that were originally rejected by SAP.

A little more than 15 years have gone and that system originally created by Jorg Janke has now evolved into ADempiere ERP a world class open source enterprise sotware package which is design from its beginnings to be easy to extend, and easy to implement.