Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) used worldwide to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications. It may be freely downloaded from drupal.org.

Bright Solutions has announced ERPAL - the first open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) application built on top of Drupal.

ERPAL was designed especially for small and medium-sized service organisations with fewer than 300 employees who work on a project or assignment basis.

ERPAL is fully web-based and provides all processes from first contact through to invoicing. This includes calculating labour costs, tracking budgets and managing billable hours.

ERPAL was borne out of need with Bright Solutions' Managing Director Manuel Pistner explaing "Accurately documenting and coordinating projects is absolutely crucial for service providers. However I couldn't find any lightweight, integrated software application that would simplify and automate all these processes. So my team and I decided to develop our own solution."

As such, Pistner states ERPAL was built for practitioners by practitioners.

Bright Solutions claims customers can save upwards of 25% of the time they spend on organisation and administration of business processes by using ERPAL.

At this time there are currently over 250 beta ERPAL installations in operation and Bright Solutions expects more than 500 service organisations to be using it by the end of 2014.

Presently ERPAL is an English-only product but German and other localisations are planned for 2015. Numerous translators from the international Drupal community have already pledged support for the product.

ERPAL only requires an Apache webserver and MySQL database to run.

Videos and training materials are available from the ERPAL web site and Bright Solutions can provide paid training and support.