If you are a small-to-medium business owner, making a software purchase that will permeate all aspects of your business is daunting, and often terrifying. Getting an Enterprise Resource Planner may be your first major software purchase.  You probably have many questions about implementation time, cost, hosting, effect on business processes, impact on employees and customization needs. These are all important decision factors that can be addressed through teamwork within your company and by working with implementers you trust.

    While the desire for a silver bullet - especially for fast-growing organizations - is a wish that might never come true, a flexible Enterprise Resource Planning software can provide a dependable advantage to your operations and development. When considering implementing this type of solution, you are likely to find contradictory, and sometimes anxiety-provoking, facts or advice.

We're here to:

1. Address the questions and concerns new ERP clients face.

2. Explain the resulting impacts.

3. Provide our approach for great implementations.

Here's what you can expect when it comes to customization: 

Your needs for customization will vary based on the complexity and uniqueness of your business processes. The trade-off between cost and functionality will be highly influential.

    The best ERPs provide a lot of out-of-the-box functionality. Better yet, some, like Odoo, are modular and allow you to include only those features you need without overwhelming the user. Past the initial configuration you may find that you need customizations. You may need to integrate with other manufacturing or shipping software you use through custom development (though Odoo 9 for example has solved a lot of these problems). There are sometimes specific business processes or ways in which you maintain competitive advantage that will require additions and modifications to the software.

Keys To Success

1. Choosing a flexible ERP, like Odoo, will give you maximum functionality right from the start. Through configuration, the process of aligning the settings of the out-of-the-box software with particular user needs, we can accomplish a lot. Getting the advice of your implementer and testing out the demo early and extensively will be helpful to these efforts.

2. Learn to do things according to software workflows as much as possible, because the flexibility aspect of the ERP should accommodate most use cases. This way you make the most of what you you've paid for up front before adding in other automation or customization.

3.  Analyze trade-offs to find those features that are non-negotiable or very high value. Reducing data entry, enabling communication between companies in a multi-company arrangement and adding country-specific functionality are the main instances where the benefits outweigh the costs. In these cases, the time saved and the ability to cover otherwise unavailable necessities will result in an overall increase in productivity and profitability. With the use of Odoo community modules and our own modifications, we can provide many diverse additions to fulfill your needs.

There you have it - some concrete advice on how to ease the implementation process, and how to get the most out of your investment.