Standard Odoo is an excellent platform covering over half the needs of an average Croatian industrial company. Larger companies with complex processes need an industry-specialist partner or costly custom development.
Some examples:
Construction. It lacks bills of quantities, payment statement calculations, construction measurement books and subcontractor tracking, all essential in Croatia.
Food industry. Lot tracking, Quality and FEFO tools exist, but they do not know your critical control points. The tools are there; industry knowledge is not.
Project manufacturing. MES features exist and improve with each release, but machine, sensor and automatic reading integrations always require development.
Fisheries. It lacks complex manufacturing orders allocating costs by raw material type. Without that, actual product costs are unknown.
Printing. It lacks estimates for digital and conventional printing processes. We developed those ourselves.
There are more examples.
This reflects the nature of a horizontal ERP platform, not a criticism of Odoo. SAP has many deep industry packages; Odoo has no equivalent. Odoo deliberately provides a broad foundation. The question is who fills the gap and at what price.
Over 200 implementations have taught me that complete construction or manufacturing scope cannot be delivered within 12 months when all these features are built from scratch. Complete scope includes sales, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, service, accounting and payroll.
We therefore built industry-specific features as ready-made modules. Clients pay for configuration, training and fine-tuning, not development already funded.
Now we are taking it further. With a partner, we are developing next-generation industry modules with embedded AI automation and decision support. ERP remains the system of record, with AI as the system of intelligence above it.
More after the event.