History
This base ERP is based on an industrial strength ERP that was modelled and developed using the Synon 2E (S2E) product.
(See originating application)
Originating Application
The Axiom ERP products started life as a project requested by one the major auditing firms in South Africa during the late 1980’s when a gap in the market was identified. A brief was given to Mark Rowles and his team of developers to create a robust and scalable finance and distribution system specifically for the South African business environment with particular attention to the concept of holding companies with diverse subsidiary companies.
At the time in SA it was common for a holding company to own subsidiaries in altogether different environments. A holding company could have a mining division, as well as a beverage manufacturer, a retailer, a distribution/logistics company and a property owning and letting business. The niche identified at the time was to create unified reporting across all these different companies and to have a consolidated set of financials without spending laborious hours consolidating multiple companies accounts to give a single view of the entire group.
Decisions on the use of a programming tool rather than native RPG development were made in the interest of faster delivery and have stood the test of time with the now considerably different application still being used in the business world and being maintained as Synon 2E models (albeit with different names as the technology evolved and acquisitions occurred).
The IBM AS/400 Server was identified as the ideal platform at the time and thus Info-Logic/400 was born. Today Infologic and Agrilogic no longer carry the /400 name but remain robust, scalable and extremely reliable applications which are in use in the Agri-business and General Business environments, with an established track record of 30 years.
Description and Brief Overview of the Product
Infologic/Agrilogic is an on-line, real-time, menu-driven application with modules covering the financial and distribution areas of business. There are a number of features that are common to all modules of the application. This consistency of approach enables the users to quickly understand the operation of the system as a whole.
The application allows for complex group structures to be defined. All elements of the client's business structures can be catered for.
Security and user access can be defined both by function and by business structure. Different levels of security may be implemented at menu level.
Posting of transactions between companies is catered for from within the general ledger and from subsidiary modules. The integrity and balance of inter-company control accounts is maintained.
Period ends are independently controlled by module. Each transaction type can be defined by the user in a way that best suits the business.
The integration of all modules to the general ledger is controlled to ensure the integrity of data entering the general ledger.
As the world of Information Technology changes and evolves, Axiom wants to keep pace with the Infologic product and bring it forward to take advantage of the many technologies that exist in the 21st century. To achieve that Axiom embarked on a journey with TEMBO (AO) to make the base product available in the Open-Source world and thus start the next chapter of our proud history.
Axiom made the intellectual property of their application models available to TEMBO, to harvest the DESIGN (application models), in order to deliver a BRAND NEW application. The following functional areas are included in this free, open source offering:
- General Ledger
- Cashbook
- Creditors
- Debtors
The balance of the product modules may become available as PREMIUM offerings at a future date. These modules include:
- Fixed Assets
- Sales
- Order Processing
- Purchasing
- Inventory
- General Ledger
- Fixed Assets
- Cashbook
- Creditors
- Debtors
- Sales
- Order Processing
- Purchasing
- Inventory
The unique AO S2E harvesting technology was used to recover the functional design from the S2E internals. All resulting application components, including all tables and data elements are brand new, removing ANY S2E references. All components and source are NEW, with not a single line of code or element of the original product remaining.
Every single source statement of the resulting NEW application (intERPrise Debtors, Creditors, GL and cashbook) will be provided to the community under the Apache 2 license terms and downloadable from GitHub.
The ILE-RPG Developers community wishes to thank Mark Auer and the board of directors of Axiom, for the significant GIFT to the entire community of global IBM i developers. This represents a massive investment of their intellectual capital and experience, to donate to us completely free, subject only to the terms of the Apache 2 license.
