Five questions to answer before you start an ERP project

Most ERP projects that go over time and budget don’t fail during the build. They fail in the first few weeks, when the scope, ownership and success criteria were never properly pinned down. Before you talk to any vendor or consultant, it’s worth answering these five questions honestly.

1. What problem are we actually solving?

“We need a new system” isn’t a problem statement. “We can’t see stock levels across our two warehouses, so we oversell every week” is. Write down the three to five concrete problems that are costing you time or money today. They become the yardstick for every decision that follows.

2. Who owns this internally?

An implementation partner can guide, configure and train, but someone inside your business needs to make decisions quickly and keep the team engaged. Pick a project owner with real authority and protect some of their time. Projects without one drift.

3. What does “done” look like for go-live?

Trying to switch everything on at once is the most common way to stall. Agree on a first phase that delivers real value, such as sales, inventory and invoicing, and a list of things that can wait until phase two. A smaller, confident go-live beats a big one that keeps slipping.

4. What data do we really need to bring across?

Migrating ten years of transactional history is expensive and rarely useful. Usually you need clean master data (customers, suppliers, products), open transactions and opening balances. Decide early what “clean” means, and who will do the cleaning.

5. How will we keep improving after launch?

The first version of any system is a starting point. Budget for a few months of refinement after go-live, and plan when you’ll review what’s working. The businesses that get the most out of Odoo treat it as something they keep improving, not a project that ends.

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If you’d like a second opinion on your answers, book a discovery call. It’s a conversation, not a sales pitch.