The ADempiere project was created in September 2006. The project name comes from the Italian word meaning 'to fulfill' but with additional context of "to complete, reach, practice, perform the duties of, or free (discharge), it also means to honor and respect", which was felt very appropriate to what the project wished to achieve.

With community members in over 30 countries stretched across six continents, for practical purposes the project is guided by a Council of contributors. A leader is nominated from this Council to act as overall Project Manager. The role of the Adempiere Council is to:

The goal of the Adempiere project is the creation of a community developed and supported open source solution that combines ERP, CRM and SCM support for business processes. The project's community believes that best method of attaining this goal is in the implementation of the Bazaar from Eric Raymond's famous article The Cathedral and the Bazaar. And indeed, ADempiere's rise, within a matter of weeks, to the top five in the SourceForge.net rankings could be considered confirmation of the power of the Bazaar as expressed by Raymond.

Adempiere inherited the Adaptative Data Dictionary from the Compiere project. This architecture allows for the extension of the database Data Dictionary concept into the application, which in turn allows for the management of the application's entities and their validation rules, as well as screen layout and display logic from within the application itself. A (Workflow Management Coalition) and Object Management Group (OMG) standards based workflow engine is utilised to provide Business Process Management. These features allow for the rapid customization of the application to a business needs as it evolves. The following business areas are addressed by the Adempiere application: