24/09/2026
There are two ways to ruin a system, and they are opposites.
The first is to customise for something you could have changed about the way you work. The code goes in, everyone is pleased, and then it sits in the middle of your platform for a decade. Every version bump has to be negotiated with it. Every support question has to be answered around it. The manager who insisted on it leaves in year two, and by year four nobody in the building can say why the field exists — only that removing it feels dangerous.
The second is to configure a standard process over the top of something your business genuinely does differently, and to call the difference a bad habit. The system goes live. Within a quarter a spreadsheet appears. Within two, the spreadsheet is the real system and the ERP is where somebody types yesterday's answers. Nobody reports this as a failure, because the project was delivered on time.
Both failures look like discipline while they are happening. The first looks like listening to the business. The second looks like sticking to standard.
The actual, difficult, unglamorous work of an implementation is telling which one you are in.
And the three options are not a spectrum from cheap-and-quick to expensive-and-slow. They are three different kinds of commitment, with three different costs, arriving at three different times.
Configuration, customisation and building — how to tell them apart before you have paid for the wrong one:
https://faceela.odoo.com/r/yXa
