Six tools around a fifteen-year-old ERP: how do you still measure anything?
Your ERP has been running for fifteen years. Reliable, but it can't do everything. So a tool was added for ticketing, one for planning, a CRM, an app for the technicians. Each for a good reason.
Short answer. Not with a seventh tool. Choose one source of truth per domain, move the processes there one by one, integrate what has to stay and switch off what nobody uses. And agree rules about data, because no tool solves those for you.
How it piles up
Nobody ever decided to have six tools. Each tool filled one gap. Planning couldn't be done in the ERP, so a planning tool came along. Customers called about interventions, so ticketing came along. An acquired company brought its own systems. Fifteen years later your customer lives in four databases, your technician in three apps, and your contract still on paper.
What it costs
Not the licences. Those you see on the invoice. The real cost you don't see: double entry, numbers that don't match between systems, and a monthly report that takes three days of Excel because nobody can pull it from one source. And the CEO's question, "how are we actually doing?", gets four different answers, depending on who you ask.
What that comes to in euros, we worked out for an installation company with 350 technicians. Read: Odoo with custom work or six tools side by side →
Not another tool on top
The reflex is a dashboard tool that brings everything together. That's tool number seven. It shows six sources contradicting each other, only faster. Overview doesn't come from an extra layer, but from fewer layers.
How you get the overview back
First you decide what becomes the single truth for customers, orders, stock, interventions and invoices. Then you move processes, domain by domain, into that one system. Not everything at once: first what keeps your company running, then the rest. What can't go in gets a solid integration. What nobody uses anymore goes out. And the acquired companies you integrate per domain, not per company: first their invoicing into the whole, then their planning, then the rest.
Then the part no tool solves: agreements about data. Who may create a customer, which fields are mandatory, what you do with a duplicate, who owns which data. We help lay down those rules, short and workable. And we help your colleagues understand why they matter: an address half filled in at the front desk is a wrong delivery in the warehouse and an unpaid invoice in accounting. One system only works if everyone writes into it with the same care.
Which number don't you trust today?
That's the question we start with when we walk the floor. The answer usually points straight to the first phase. Because the number you don't trust is the number that comes from three tools.
How many of your tools would you miss tomorrow? If you don't know the answer, that is the answer.
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