How a Thorough Needs Assessment Helps You Get More From Odoo

Ideally, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system like Odoo will make your business more connected, scalable, and powerful. The entire point of an ERP is to simplify and streamline: Everything from accounting and inventory to sales and project management should be able to function together effortlessly.

In the real world, however, ERP implementations fall short of their promise. They run over budget, frustrate customers, and fail to deliver the transformative results promised by the product literature.

The problem usually isn’t the software itself — particularly with Odoo, which we’ve implemented effectively for businesses of all sizes. The problem is a failure to plan.

A thorough needs assessment is the single most important factor in a successful Odoo implementation. It’s the blueprint that ensures the platform is tailored to the unique way your business operates. Skipping this foundational step is the number one cause of costly ERP failures.

In this article, we’ll explore what a proper needs assessment entails and how it helps you get a real return on your Odoo investment.

The High Cost of a Misaligned ERP

When an Odoo implementation is rushed without a proper needs assessment, it creates problems. Without a clear understanding of your goals and existing workflows, you can end up with:

Unnecessary Costs: You might pay for modules you don’t need or sink money into custom features that don’t solve a real problem. Feature bloat wastes money — and it also makes the system more complex and difficult to use.
Frustrated Users: If the new system doesn’t make an employee’s job easier, they won’t use it. Low user adoption can undermine the entire investment: When employees quietly revert to using old spreadsheets, the ERP has failed.
Flawed Data: Migrating messy, unorganized data from old systems into Odoo without a clear plan or accurate mapping can lead to inaccurate reports (or major operational disruptions, depending on the nature of the migration).
Excessive Customization: Odoo is flexible, but over-customization can create a system that is difficult to maintain and nearly impossible to upgrade. Learn how Blue Stingray helped Mesa Logistics Group migrate to Odoo 16 while preserving customizations.

A misaligned ERP costs you efficiency, morale, and the competitive advantage you were trying to gain in the first place. To avoid that type of technical debt, you need a plan that goes farther than “we need an ERP.”

You need to understand the problems that you’re trying to solve — and a development team that shares that understanding.

The Blueprint for Success: What Is a Real Needs Assessment?

A needs assessment is an in-depth, collaborative process designed to build a comprehensive understanding of your business from the ground up. At Blue Stingray, we handle the assessment in three basic stages:

1. Mapping the “As-Is” State

You cannot make improvements if you don’t understand how your business operates right now.

Sounds simple, right? Unfortunately, many businesses fail to identify all the key stakeholders involved in an ERP implementation — which is a problem, since virtually every member of your organization will be impacted by a new ERP.

Your approach should focus on mapping your actual day-to-day workflows, from sales processes and inventory management to accounting and HR. When we take on a new Odoo project, we make an effort to sit down with the people who perform the work — managers, department heads, and end-users — to identify the specific inefficiencies that need to be improved.

Mapping the “as-is” state ensures that the ERP implementation will solve problems that actually exist. Just as importantly, it helps developers cut out unnecessary Odoo features that could add bloat (and costly technical debt) to the project.

2. Defining the “To-Be” Vision

Once we understand your current challenges, we work with you to define your ideal future state. This is about preserving what works, not just fixing what’s broken.

After all, the vast majority of our clients are already operating successful businesses. Odoo should complement the good processes that have helped those businesses succeed. It should not force your team into a workflow that they hate.

In practice, that might mean keeping legacy systems while building implementations to bring their data into Odoo. It might mean sticking with your current eCommerce platform, but using Odoo to manage accounting and sales. It might mean distinguishing between the “essential” features and the “nice-to-have” features, then setting the secondary goals aside for the time being.

A capable Odoo partner will recognize that not everything needs to be “disrupted” in every single project.

Identifying the goals of the project will help to align the Odoo implementation with the long-term business vision. More importantly, it ensures that you’re not being transformative unless it’s necessary.

3. Engaging the Team for Adoption

An ERP implementation is also a cultural change (that’s true for any software, but it’s especially the case when your entire business is switching to a more-or-less standardized platform).

To that end, we engage key stakeholders across all departments. Involving your team early fosters a sense of ownership in the process and dramatically reduces resistance to change.

If you skip this step, expect to hear a lot of comments like “the old way worked fine,” and “I’m just trying to do my job the way that I know how to do it.” When your team understands why the change is happening and how it will benefit them directly, you’re giving them room to become active participants.

That’s important, because most Odoo projects won’t end immediately after launch. You’ll need to make tweaks, create new customizations, and so on.

To do that as effectively as possible, you’ll need feedback from the people who are actually using the platform on an everyday basis. And to make that happen, you’ll need to make sure they’re actually using it.

From Odoo Assessment to Implementation: Getting a Real ROI

Your needs assessment guides every decision in the Odoo implementation process, and when managed correctly, it helps you start using the ERP effectively on day one. If you’re looking for ways to save on your project, spend more time and resources on the needs assessment, not less.

To that end, your Odoo development partner must understand the way your business functions.

Often, we’re brought in to “clean up” when a developer fails to meet deadlines, or when an Odoo customization disrupts key processes, or when an ERP integration fails to deliver anything tangible for the business — and in nearly every single case, it’s because the developer made assumptions about the way the business should operate.

The good news is that with an experienced partner, Odoo can be transformative. In fact, we use it ourselves.

To see how a successful Odoo implementation supports business outcomes, read:

If you’re ready to explore how a well-planned Odoo implementation can transform your business, contact us today to schedule a demo.