Ask HN: Your Business Future ERP System

[Qniwwwerss]

Hi all! I want to ask you a question about ERP systems. I have viewed a lot of posts, where a lot of people say that most ERP systems they've used are bad/not good enough, so I want to make a way new Product. For those who don't know what ERP system is: Enterprise Resource Planning software helps companies more efficiently manage their resources . Why Your Start-up need it? Because You want to grow.

I am going to start a company which will be creating Permissioned Blockchain Based ERP systems. My intent is to make ERP systems more secure, with more closer meet to Your particular business needs.

Quick Intro: Permissioned Blockchain allows us to control who reads and writes the data. Using this, and other technologies that we will make our Product even more secure, we, hopefully, will prevent data leaks. Additionally, (I believe it is called ERP systems as well) I want our product also to cover Universities and Hospitals. That is a very popular problem in hospitals, unfortunately.

In a week, I will launch the first landing page, and currently I am working on the "Finances" module. If You want more information, feel free to direct message me. https://www.linkedin.com/in/oleksandr-matviienko-4a7b16248/

But firstly, I need to ask You a few questions: What exactly you don't like in your ERP systems? What You think should be improved? Your opinion about my product?

[qetuo13579]

At my workplace we use lots of different tools and systems. No one has access to everything because of licensing costs. SAP Business One is the main ERP but to have part numbers added to the database, engineers use a separate ticket system like Jira to instruct the finance people how to do the data entry in SAP. Code is in Gitlab. Docs are in Sharepoint. Every department has their own kingdom and manages documents in Sharepoint differently with access restrictions frustrating everyone. Some documents are too sensitive to be put in Sharepoint, which makes for even more frustration.

[Qniwwwerss]

What I am planning, is to make not with license, because You may not pay in time and lose all access, but to pay once, teach workers, support if needed, and then let go. Probably, I will think about it more in future, but for now either like this, or with only yearly subscription. Our solution still should solve access restrictions. If You are in the list of "valid" identities - You can read and write the data.

We can make a separation by departments also, however would You mind sharing what exactly is wrong with access restrictions?

[gus_massa]

How do you prevent leaks caused by mmorons writing the password on a potit on the monitor?

[Qniwwwerss]

Tough situation :D

In the way I see it, there will be x509 certificates representing each worker. Using that, we can define who can read, and who can write the data. Ideally, made it mostly automated. If you are not in the "list" of valid identities - Your request simply won't proceed. That's not enough to hack the password, you should hack the entire system, which makes task quite a lot harder (which I am also considering).

[gus_massa]

Is the data in the blockchain?

[Qniwwwerss]

Yes, the most sensitive data will be stored in the blockchain.

[gus_massa]

And how do you revoque authorizatio to read it?

[Qniwwwerss]

We can simply remove that identity from list, so it will not be able to read or write. I think we can also change permissions, to restrict reading/writing.

[rosenjon]

facepalm. You are going to put all of a businesses more sensitive/proprietary data in the blockchain. Why? Also, blockchain is the least performant database in the world. When ERP requires most performant database. Why??!!

[Qniwwwerss]

1. We are not going to put all business data to open world. We use permissioned blockchain technology, which means that it will only be accessible to a very small circle of people. 2. I think waiting 1 millisecond more, but being sure that your data is protected is better than just having quick responses. It's all a matter of implementation, you can make even the fastest database the slowest by making one mistake in the code.