Odoo breaks the image of traditional ERP by providing out of the box modularity. Odoo's powerful customization is one of the reasons behind odoo's enormous popularity. Odoo's powerful framework lets developers provide new features by different customized apps. As a result, you can see thousands of apps in the Odoo app store and with these many apps and features, odoo can cover more areas than any other ERP software in the market.
Customization always seems an easy option for complex business flows, but some time customization can generate issues. It is often found, excessive customization leads to the complex system and instead of increasing productivity, it decreases it.
With great power comes great responsibility.
- Uncle Ben
Customizing your ERP is virtually inevitable. Perfect ERP system does not exist and it never will. To adapt your business processes around the solution you must need customization but there are few methods to make implementation simplified and unnecessary customization can be avoided.
What do you need to take care of?
1. Understand the difference between customization and configuration.
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2. Ensure business requirements are clearly defined.
Lack of clear requirements is the primary reason behind the faulty implementation. Incorrect requirements often create more problems later on. For clear specifications, you need to take care of a few things during retirement analysis.
Discover the primary business requirements.
Define the scope, don't stretch too much.
Categorize business requirements.
Identify key end-user (some time clients are not the end-user).
Consider technical feasibility.
Define the detailed requirements before going for development.
3. Use project management and governance techniques.
If you are working on a large project, it is necessary to use some tools to keep an eye on the progress of the project. Without proper project governance, the project team customizes every requirement of the user without prioritizing it. Sometimes, secondary business requirements get more attention and primary things got fade away.
The best practice is to categorize business requirements and prioritize them based on their value.
4. Keep it simple at the beginning.
The best way to handle large projects is to start with the core/primary requirements. Choose simple ones and then move towards the complex one. In this way, you will implement the whole thing around the core requirement and all subsequent requirements will fit easily into the core like puzzle pieces. If you have the larger team then you can start developing non-conflicting requirements simultaneously.
5. Think about other options
Sometimes you need Odoo customization just because your business flow does not fit with Odoo. But you can think again, is it so. It is possible by adjusting a little bit you can avoid extra customization.
In some cases, it might possible that you can change your company's internal flow according to Odoo's default flow. Yes, it sounds stupid, but Odoo's default flow is used by several companies around the world. That might possibly, by changing your company's internal flow your company become more productive, In simple word, just take some time before start customizations.
6. Taking account the risks
Long-term risk: As odoo releasing newer version every year, you need to consider issues may occur in the long term. Mostly with customization maintenance and upgrades are more difficult.
Business continuity risk: Most of the time, with third-party integration projects dependent technology or vendor stop supporting. Some time system creates a dependency on the system developer.
Implementation risk: To deliver a customized solution, you should find the balance between development efforts, quality, and cost. Some time solutions are good on paper but no easy to develop