KhaqanWhat is Odoo?
Odoo is a modular, open-source ERP and business application suite from Belgium, written in Python on PostgreSQL, that covers accounting, inventory, manufacturing, sales, CRM, HR, websites and more, available as a free Community edition and a paid Enterprise edition.
Odoo began in 2005 as TinyERP, became OpenERP and took its current name in 2014. It is built as a set of apps (modules) on a shared Python framework and a single PostgreSQL database, so a company can start with accounting and invoicing and add inventory, manufacturing, purchasing, projects, helpdesk or e-commerce later without changing platform. The Community edition is published under the LGPL and can be self-hosted at no licence cost; the Enterprise edition adds features and official hosting under a subscription. A new major version is released each year.
It matters to mid-sized businesses because it makes a full ERP affordable and adaptable. The framework's inheritance model lets developers extend any screen, model or workflow in a separate module rather than editing the core, which is what makes customisation upgrade-safe when it is done properly and dangerous when it is not.
In practice I run one Odoo ERP for a manufacturing group across six sites, and the discipline I value most is a written inventory of every custom module and what it touches, because that list is the upgrade plan.
The common mistake is treating the yearly release cycle as optional. Each version is supported for a limited window, and a company that stays on an old version for years accumulates customisations against an API that no longer exists, until the upgrade becomes a re-implementation. The second mistake is granting broad administrator rights to get past a permissions problem and never taking them back; single sign-on and two-factor authentication are worth setting up on the first day.
Related terms
- ERP (enterprise resource planning): Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software runs a company's core operations, such as finance, purchasing, inventory, sales, manufacturing and HR, from one shared database, so a transaction entered once in one department is visible and correct everywhere else.
- ERP customisation risk (upgrade-safe customisation): ERP customisation risk is the danger that changes made to fit an ERP to a business (custom code, edited core files, database tweaks, undocumented workflows) will break, block or inflate the cost of the next upgrade; upgrade-safe customisation is the discipline of avoiding that.
- ERP health check: An ERP health check is a structured review of an ERP system that tests whether its data, customisations, integrations, backups, performance and user access are sound, and produces a prioritised list of risks and fixes before they turn into outages or wrong numbers.
- machine scheduling in an ERP: Machine scheduling in an ERP is the planning of manufacturing work orders onto specific machines or work centres over time, respecting each machine's capacity and availability, so that the schedule is realistic and no two orders claim the same machine at once.