The question we hear most from organisations weighing up an enterprise resource planning system is this: we are not ready for the whole system yet, but we need a website now. Can we start with just the website part, and will we have to rebuild it later if we do?

A business that sells to educational institutions does not run like one that sells to factories. Work arrives as projects. Each project carries its own specification document, its own deadline, and ends in a handover that has to be accepted against stated conditions.

An industrial waste business differs from an ordinary product business in one respect. What the contract fixes is not a number of items but a weight to be collected and disposed of within a period, and the collection happens over many rounds across the life of the contract. So the question that has to be answerable every day is a single one: how much has been collected against this contract, and how much is left.

Any organization choosing an ERP implementer runs into the same question: how do you know the provider can actually work with the system? Anything a provider writes about itself will naturally describe only the good side.

Many business owners have had this happen. You send a proposal and hear nothing. When you follow up later, you learn that the client's procurement team looked your company up first and found nothing at all, or found a website last updated three years ago.

Sales managers already running Odoo tend to ask the same question when annual planning season arrives: how detailed can a sales target be? Setting a total target per salesperson is clearly supported. But what about stating which customer should buy which product, for how much, in which month? Does the standard system handle that?