Hi John!

there is a short answer and then it's possible to dissect the future needs in a deep-dive.

Soft Facts

Indeed, most important thing for you as a customer of Odoo SA is for them to be on your side as a software publisher.

Odoo SA is a 1000+ employees, so they are a stable partner for building this Digital Asset together with for Abccorp.

I know you are disappointed with Odoo SA's upgrade service at the moment, the aggressive cross-selling between Enterprise (EE) subscriptions and .sh, as also lack of flexibility in their service to you, as a new customers. 

But you can give them the benefit of out doubt, that this is a temporary negative experience, and things will evolve into better times!

Hard Facts

BTO is a core business process for Abccorp. 

Community Edition (CE) is laden with restrictions in the Manufacturing module.

In the future, we expect Manuf. to be provided as an "Enterprise only" feature.

So this alone is a major hard fact to go with EE.

As this Digital Asset becomes the core of the Abccorp organisation, the Accounting module will soon become a major value-add.

While the German Charts of Accounts are available in the free-version, "regular" accounting features like bank-integration, payment reconciliation, reporting, budgets, vendor payments etc. etc. are not fully available in the free version.

I know we don't need everything right now, but we will be driving with tyres 50% full on the free-version, on the ERP journey ahead.

You already mentioned barcoding, which is an essential feature for the upcoming roadmap.

Please also consider the mobile-app, which is available only for EE.

So I still recommend the Enterprise subscription.

Let me know if we should go into specific details.

Regards

Ashant

On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 4:00 PM John Doe <Johnryna@Abccorp.com> wrote:
Hi Ashant,

I am writing to ask for your advice regarding Odoo Enterprise.

To be honest I wasn‘t aware of the Community option that we could use free of charge.
As far as I got from available information Community and Enterprise have a major difference in tech support and some features available exclusively in Enterprise edition.

Tech support

Using Community edition would mean that Simplify would do all tech support, which honestly almost doesn‘t change anything for us because we are highly dependent on your input in terms of fixing, upgrading and development. In the situation with delays from Odoo's side, I wouldn‘t rely on them in these regards - seems to be not really efficient.

So from this perspective, it seems to me that you and your team potentially could cover this service.

Functionality

Considering our case I just see potential downsides for functionalities that we are going to use.

Specifically:

Manufacturing - control panel, scheduling
Accounting - General leger, etc
Inventory - barcode scanning, shipping connectors

I am not sure what unavailable Manufacturing and Accounting features do. Probably we don‘t even need them.
Regarding Inventory, I think we need barcode scanning. To be able to automate work in the fulfillment center.
Shipping connectors not sure again. We use Sendcloud at the moment to generate Shipping labels but might be better to have everything in Odoo.

Summing up I don‘t really see the point to pay for Enterprise while we don‘t really need most benefits they are offering there.

Nevertheless, I feel like I don‘t have a full picture due to my lack of experience working with different versions of Odoo. Probably there are some other points that we should consider.

I would highly appreciate if you could evaluate the option of using Odoo Community for us. You have better experience and understanding of Odoo.

What do we lose if we stay on the Community version?
Is that realistic to use it considering our current processes?

How flexible it is if we realize in some months that we need Enterprise? Would that be an additional workload to switch to it?

Please let me know what you could advise.
Thank you in advance.

Best regards,
--
John Doe, Project Manager – Abccorp.com