Steve Jobs Project/POS/Review:en
Analysis of OpenBravo in the Cameroonian setting
The open source POS open bravo is one of many of such software providing this service to businesses. It however stands out due to some of its perculiar features and it is arguably the best POS in the world. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openbravo for more information.
Despite the fact that it is the best ERP software in the world, It still is not applicable in the Cameroonian economic context. The reasons for my argument are given below:-
- Most Cameroonian business men are not computer literate.
- The interface of the open bravo POS has very little affordance so needs a lot of training to use. A simple example of this problem is the fact that there are no tooltips on buttons whose icons are hardly obvious of what they do. The need for such training will discourage potential customers of the POS.
- The openbravoPOS does not support the currency used in Cameroon yet (The CFA francs), but (perhaps since the numbers are integers we need to manipulate just the currency name in the code.). It makes it impossible to track accounts and the likes of it, even doubling the work which the local business man has to put in (From looking up exchange rates and determining the prices of his goods and/or services in euros and dollars
The above raised points therefore call for the need of the system to be modified to suit the local community. In this light, I am making a call to the other apprentices of this project to join me in:
- Its modification if not completely rebuilding the interface,
- Assigning tooltips for the buttons, and
- Adding and integrating the Francs CFA currency into the system.
After all these must have been done, wonderful POS most definitely will then be the way foward in the Cameroonian society. Other sugestions are welcome. Klexysmile (talk)
