I still remember my first ERP project. We started full of enthusiasm: a kick-off with cake, a planning in Excel, and a vendor who said everything was “very logical and standard”. Spoiler: it was not. Three months in, we were no further than a new version of the plan, the director asked where his dashboards were, and the employees missed their old system. I knew one thing for certain: next time had to be different.
By now we have done more than eighty Odoo implementations at Radical Fanatics, and every time we see the same pattern: the software is rarely the problem. The project is.
Why “our IT guy will handle it” does not work
The biggest misconception is that an ERP implementation is an IT party: install something, do a training, done. But an ERP touches everything - from sales to accounting, from inventory to timesheets. It is not an IT project, it is a change project.
A customer once said in the first meeting: “Our IT guy will carry this.” All respect for IT people, they are indispensable. But I have seen few of them complete an ERP implementation successfully on their own. ERP is about processes, people and collaboration between departments - and that combination of process knowledge plus decision-making power rarely sits in one role. Our own team does nothing but Odoo implementations, and even we still regularly discover new points of attention.
The four pitfalls (and what to do about them)
1. Nobody feels truly responsible. The director thinks “IT will handle it”, IT thinks “the business decides”, the vendor thinks “just tell us”. Lots of noise, little result. The solution: one project lead with a mandate. Not a meeting coordinator, but someone allowed to decide. At SMBs that is almost always an owner or director - and if they have no time, we advise postponing the project.
2. Vague wishes, no choices. “We want to keep everything we have now, but more modern.” Sounds nice, does not work. If you want everything, you get nothing - especially with a flexible system like Odoo, which demands choices. The solution: start with a fit-gap analysis per process. What do you use today, what do you want tomorrow, and what can go?
3. Too little involvement from the top. If management only shows up at the kick-off and the delivery, you have a problem. As soon as it gets tense (and it will), you want someone with weight at the table. The solution: short, fixed check-ins. No endless meetings; just the weekly or biweekly question “are we on schedule or not?”.
4. No grip on progress. A planning somewhere on SharePoint, tasks everyone “picks up when there is time”, and at the end everybody says “that was not on my list, was it?”. The solution: make tasks concrete, tie them to names and keep a finger on the pulse every week.
Odoo is Lego: beautiful, provided you know what you are building
Odoo is a beautiful system, but it is like Lego: without a building plan you end up with a bin of loose bricks. Its strength lies in modules you compose yourself, and exactly that freedom needs organising.
These four lessons once formed our TARGET method; by now they have grown into the kickstart method we run every project with: fit-gap per process, the whole project on paper before we start, a proof of concept in four weeks, weekly check-ins and opt-out moments along the way. We wrote it all down in our book - free to download, even if you never become a customer.
What we see time and again after dozens of switches from SAP, Dynamics, Exact and AFAS: companies that invest a few days in analysis and alignment up front win back months afterwards. Companies that keep compromising to please everyone end up in chaos. And companies that think “we will do it on the side” never end up doing it well.
So: do not start with the software, start with the project. Get the right people at the table, make choices, and pick a partner who understands both the technology and the business. Then ERP is not a nightmare, but exactly what you wanted: calm, overview and grip on your company.