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.
Jörg Janke - The Master Mind
Jorg Janke, designed and developed Compiere ERP, known as Adempiere's predecessor. By then Jörg had over 20 years experience working with world class ERP systems. He is a certified Java Programmer and an Oracle Database Administrator (DBA) data. In the beginning, he founded a company named "SoftCream" and later sold it to ADV / Orga. This was one of the pioneers in the integration of business processes in Germany.
Jörg continued to work for ADV / Orga UNISYS and later with his client, a sales solution running on UNIX, written in COBOL ISAM and archiving. He continued to administer the UNISYS Business Management Systems in Europe.
By then he developed a Compiere prototype on Oracle 5; then in 1992 moved to Oracle Corp. as Applications Manager, and later took over as part of the application development team in Redwood Shores, California (USA), where he became Director of Enterprise Systems. There he led the development of multi currency reporting in Oracle, and invented an Application Implementation Wizard which shortened application deployment times dramatically. Oracle applications grew from this plataform, similar to what SAP had done with similar programs.
The problem with these technologies was that the "multi" features were added after the core application had been develped. This resulted in significant inefficiencies, costs and delays. On the other hand Jorg knew that ERP had to be designed as a "multi" capable solution from its inception, which will in turn result in minimal development costs and maintenance.