What PORTWARE is

PORTWARE is a Productive Business Management System; ERP (enterprise resource planning) is only a small part of it. It is built on the world's most widely used open-source business-management core, backed by CapitalG, the growth fund of Google's parent Alphabet — and taken far beyond it with manufacturing, engineering, AI and office layers. The two largest layers: an office suite that edits documents inside the browser (PORTWARE Office) and an artificial intelligence assistant that works with the system's own data (Cowork). Around them are hundreds of modules written to serve the real work of a company.

All of these figures were generated by reading the source tree and the production database; none of them was typed in. The module pages show the same data in full, module by module.

Why PORTWARE: the purpose, the problems it solves, what it gives

PORTWARE's purpose fits in one sentence: a company's work is done, followed up and remembered in one system. Growing companies rarely slow down for lack of work; they slow down because the work is scattered, forgotten or kept in a few heads.

What it gives: time back every week, control without chasing, a lower cost of ownership, fewer mistakes, an order ready to grow and a system that is yours for good. Every team sees its own gain: management the company's pulse on one screen, sales the margin on every line, production one flow, engineering the product's record, finance e-Invoice and the cash forecast, employees timesheets that fill themselves.

An investor sees the same picture: one product and one codebase, a licence sold once with yearly maintenance, an AI foundation with controls and a design for Türkiye. The detail is on portware.io/investors; PORTWARE® is a trademark registered with the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (TÜRKPATENT).

Not an ERP: a Productive Business Management System

An ERP keeps the records of a business: orders, stock, invoices, journal entries. PORTWARE keeps those records and does not stop there: it runs the work itself. ERP sits inside PORTWARE as a small part; six layers around it make the work productive:

In short: ERP is the records; PORTWARE is the records, the work and the knowledge that make them productive.

A complete engineering development environment

A product team designs, changes, documents and ships inside PORTWARE: its own office (PORTWARE Office), Git Studio for software (versions, baselines, customer configurations, a release gate), PLM and electronics (ECAD) with the CAD viewer, traceability from requirement to test, HTML documents and SODRAW diagrams. All of it sits on the product's record and runs on an AI foundation: Cowork reads all of it, prepares changes and applies them only with approval.

Work follow-up: nothing is left to chance

Follow-up decides whether any job succeeds. PORTWARE does not leave it to luck or to someone's initiative; it follows the work and makes sure it is followed:

• A Task button on every quotation, opportunity, order and document; the work is planned on the calendar.
• When an activity is done, moved or handed on, the person who scheduled it is told.
• Meeting time, completed activities, field service, leave and public holidays reach the timesheet by themselves; no extra workload for the user.
• For a meeting held outside PORTWARE, hand Cowork a photo of your notebook or read the notes to it: it files them on the right records and proposes an action plan for your approval.

Three obstacles to growth

What holds most companies back is not the workload but disorder. Three symptoms appear together:

• No traceability. Who did what, and when, is unknown; information is spread over e-mails, spreadsheets and people's memory.
• No coordination of action and follow-up. A decision taken in a meeting has no owner, follow-up depends on individuals, work falls through the cracks.
• No scalability. As the company grows, processes stay dependent on a few people; adding a team or a branch breaks the order.

PORTWARE builds the order and the system that solve these, and much more: every job, document and decision sits on its record with its history; every decision becomes a task with an owner and a date, and the morning briefing reminds; a new team, branch or application opens in the same system. Growth comes with order.

Why open source and not a closed licence

The decision is deliberate and on record: no closed-licence modules are used. The reasons come down to three points.

• Ownership. The system runs on our own server and its data is on our own disk. Not renewing a licence is not a cost line; it is a decision for independence.
• Changeability. The open-source core can be read and extended. Every missing capability was written as a module instead of being bought as a commercial package — and that is most of the system this book describes.
• Measurement. A closed component cannot be measured. We can see what our own module does and why, and what each test proves.

Three layers

The easiest way to understand the system is to see it as three layers.

1. The core — records and processes

Customer, quotation, order, invoice, product, stock move, employee, project… All of them are records that work to the same pattern: each has a form, a list, a conversation stream (the chatter), attachments and a history. Chapter 4 explains this pattern in detail; once learnt, most of the rest of the system feels familiar.

Processes connect these records: the opportunity leads to the quotation, the quotation to the order, and the order is responsible for delivery and invoice. Chapter 16 follows this chain from end to end.

2. PORTWARE Office — documents

Word, Excel and presentation files are not downloaded and uploaded again; they open inside the browser, on top of the record, and are edited together. ONLYOFFICE Document Server runs underneath, but for the user it is invisible: a .docx attached to a quotation opens when clicked, two people can write at the same time, every save leaves a version and two versions can be compared in colour. Chapters 8 and 9 describe it.

3. Cowork — artificial intelligence

Cowork is not a chat box; it is an assistant that can reach the system's data and call tools. It searches records, reads attachments, writes documents, produces reports and extracts tables from PDFs. It works with the models of eight different providers, and which model does which job, in how much time and with what accuracy, is chosen by measurement. Chapters 12–15.

The company and the real work

PORTWARE did not grow as an abstract product but to serve the work of a real company: an industrial firm that makes servo motors, drives, motion control and CNC machines. That visibly shaped the system:

• Product data is technical. A product's name and price are not enough; measurable values such as torque, voltage class, encoder type, communication protocol and temperature range sit in separate fields on the record — both the website and the selection guide read them.
• Documents are heavy. Datasheet, CAD file, EDS/ESI description file, user manual. That is why attachment management, folders, versioning and the CAD viewer are first-class topics.
• The channel has two tiers. Direct customers and dealers. A dealer sees the same website with their own prices; their request turns into an order. Chapter 28.

Case

A typical request that shaped the system

Situation

A dealer wants to see a product on the website at their own price and place an order from there.

What was done

No separate dealer website was built. A bridge module was added to the existing corporate website that shows a signed-in dealer their own price list; the basket became a "request", and an approved request became a sales order.

Result

One catalogue, one set of product data, one address. The page the dealer sees and the page everyone sees are the same page; the only differences are the price and the order button.

This shows a preference that recurs throughout the book: extend what exists instead of producing a second copy. Two copies drift apart sooner or later, and the question of which one is right appears.

In step with Türkiye's AI Action Plan

The Ministry of Industry and Technology's Türkiye AI Action Plan 2026–2030 (Presidential Circular 2026/9) rests on four axes and sixteen actions: Notice, Benefit, Produce, Govern (Fark Et, İstifade Et, Üret, Yönet). For a company the most concrete axis is Benefit: putting AI into everyday work in the public and private sectors. PORTWARE meets that axis for an SME today, installed:

The plan foresees tools that support SMEs' access to AI solutions (for example AI vouchers for SMEs). We review that support with you as its conditions are announced. Source: sanayi.gov.tr/yapayzekaeylemplani.

Frequently asked

Where does our data live? On the server you choose: your own or PORTWARE Cloud. Backup and recovery are written into the contract.

Does AI take our data outside? Only the part the task needs goes out, through the providers' enterprise programming interfaces. For confidential work PORTWARE Local AI is chosen and the data does not leave the server. Web research is one-way: information comes from the web into the company.

Are we locked in? No. The core is open source (LGPL-3), the data is in standard PostgreSQL and the AI provider is a setting.

What about our old data? Customers, products, stock and open balances are imported; data migration is its own step in the implementation project.

Does it work on a phone? Yes: it installs like an app, receives notifications and takes voice.

How do updates arrive? One product, one codebase: every installation takes the next release with its notes and a maintenance window; a customer-specific need lives in its own module and never blocks the update.

The system this book describes is live

Everything you read here runs in production. The behaviour described is not an imagined design; it has been measured, tested and put live. If a feature is not finished yet, the book says so plainly — hiding the difference between "to do" and "done" is the most harmful thing documentation can do.