''Helium V'' is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

ERP suite. It has been developed by ''Helium V IT-Solutions GmbH'' in Austria starting in 2005. The industry of initial focus has been electronic manufacturing. The targeted customers are small and medium-sized companies (SMEs). In this SME context, the evaluation of KPIs is of great importance, so this is very high on the developer's agenda. The software is available as open-source since October 2010. It is an integral part of the

Lisog The Open Source Business Alliance - Bundesverband für digitale Souveränität e.V. is a German non-profit that operates Europe's biggest network of companies and organizations developing, building and using open source software. History The alli ...

open-source stack initiative.

Features

''Helium V'' covers the whole process cycle of a company, providing modules for: * Quotation * Purchase * Production planning * Procurement * Capacity planning * Merchandise management (ERP) * Item master * Time tracking * Production * Delivery * Post calculation * Accounting * Payment management In practice, the ERP shows a high degree of flexibility and customization opportunities, allowing solutions to be tailored to fit the needs of each company.

Industries

As a result of constant development the ERP-suite has managed to cover all major industries: * Electrical * Electronics * Metal processing * Mechanical engineering * Plastics technology * Food * Advertising agencies * Services

Architecture

The system is based on a

J2EE Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web serv ...

architecture. Therefore, it is written in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

, using

JBoss WildFly, formerly known as JBoss AS, or simply JBoss, is an application server written by JBoss, now developed by Red Hat. WildFly is written in Java and implements the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specification. It runs on multip ...

as applications server and

Postgres PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

as default database. MS-SQL or

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word '' ...

are supported on special request. The

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

is written with the Java SWING toolkit. As a result, ''Helium V'' runs on any platform which supports

(Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). A key feature of the suite is its customizability: For example, the administrator can define the screens, tabs or elements visible for users. The time tracking functionality can already be accessed via an

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

; more APIs are planned and in development. ''Helium V'' provides multilingual support through

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

. Languages available as of today are German (Germany/Austria/Switzerland) and English.

Business model

The business model of ''Helium V'' is based on the dual licensing model. The

edition comes with no warranty or professional support; such services are provided by ''Helium V IT Systems GmbH'' (Austria) for the enterprise edition. The developer does, however, provide an open platform to nurture open source engagement. Hence, community contributions are accepted and appreciated. The contributor has to sign a contribution agreement or provide the source code under a liberal open source license like the

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

Integration

The ''Helium V'' development team is interested in a seamless integration with other (open source) components. The first official integration partner is ''agorum'' with the DMS system

agorum core agorum ''core'' is a free and open-source Enterprise Content Management system by ''agorum Software GmbH'' from Germany. One of the main features is the Document-Network-Share. With that the documents within the ECM are shown as a normal netwo ...

.Announcement of integration of agorum core into Helium V (German)
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Co-operations

The developers of ''Helium V'' are working closely together with academic institutions in order to improve the quality of the software. The following universities are supporting the further development of ''Helium V'' at the moment:
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

University of Applied Sciences Kufstein, Austria

References

External links

''Helium V'' Company Profile on LinkedIn (German)

''Helium V'' Company Profile on Xing (German)

Official site for the Business Edition

Community site for the Open Source Edition (German)

Community site for the Open Source Edition (English)

Lisog Homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Helium V Free ERP software ERP software Free business software Enterprise resource planning software for Linux Software using the GNU AGPL license