We’re a mid sized D2C business with a retail presence. High growth (2x last year, on track for 3x this year), run our own fulfilment operations (warehousing, order assembly, shipping with standard carriers for D2C, through distribution partners for retail) including cross border UK/Europe.
We’ve got about as far as we can with a mixture of spreadsheets, proprietary tools and several SaaS products but the spiderweb we’ve created is starting to creak and will soon become a bottleneck.
An ERP is the next obvious step but I’ve been through the pain of implementing before and ended up pouring concrete on processes with big monolithic systems. We’re too agile for that and growing too fast to be certain enough about what the next 6m looks like let alone the next 6 years.
Odoo seems like the best of a bad bunch in all honesty but I need to get my head around the reality of customisation. My 3 questions:
1 - The “vanilla” version of Odoo just won’t cut it for us so we’ll be adapting from day one. I’ve been told this isn’t a problem so long as the scoping is done well. Does anyone have experience of customisation from the start and how much harder did it make the implementation?
2 - longer term, how expensive can custom features be? I know this is a “how long is a piece of string” question, but is there any way I can gauge this in terms of cash and timeline? In my experience, being told by ERP providers “this will cost £100k and take 3 months” is not an experience I want to re-live.
3 - Does anyone have experience of taking customisation in house? How easy is it to just build yourself on the platform and what are the pitfalls?
Appreciate the advice!