7-part guide
Every ERP project involves a choice that gets made early and almost never revisited: deploy everything at once or go in waves. After 100+ Odoo implementations across the US, Canada, and...
Why this matters
Every ERP project involves a choice that gets made early and almost never revisited: deploy everything at once or go in waves. After 100+ Odoo implementations across the US, Canada, and France, we have never once regretted recommending a phased erp rollout strategy. Big bang launches look faster on a Gantt chart. They...
1 of 7
When you go live in waves, every module launch is a discrete business event with a named owner. The AP manager owns Wave 1 Accounting go-live. The warehouse lead owns Wave 2 Inventory. Ownership is not shared across a 20-module cutover, it is specific, visible, and tied to a sprint retrospective. Business users stop...
2 of 7
A big bang go-live hands the business 20 modules simultaneously. Defects compound: a misconfigured fiscal localization corrupts journal entries that feed the Analytic Accounting that feeds the project margin reports. In a phased rollout the Accounting module has been live for 90 days before Inventory touches it....
3 of 7
Asking 80 users to learn a new ERP in two weeks is asking them to do their job badly for those two weeks. Phased rollouts train 15 users on Accounting in Week 1, then 20 users on Inventory in Week 6, then the operations team on Manufacturing in Week 14. Each cohort absorbs the system before the next wave starts. Power...
4 of 7
Migrating eight years of Purchase history, open AR, fixed-asset records, and multi-warehouse stock positions in a single weekend is one of the riskiest operations in enterprise IT. A phased migration cuts that risk into isolated loads: customer and vendor master in Wave 1, open AR/AP in Wave 2, inventory balances in...
5 of 7
Change management is usually the first line item cut when an ERP project runs over budget. In a big bang, that cut is catastrophic, there is no second chance at user adoption. In a phased rollout, change management cost is distributed across waves. The first wave teaches the team how to run change management...
6 of 7
Most mid-market companies connect their ERP to at least one external system, a 3PL WMS, an eCommerce platform, a payroll bureau, a banking feed. In a big bang deployment, all integrations must be production-ready on Day 1. In a phased rollout, the Accounting bank feed goes live in Wave 1, the eCommerce connector goes...
7 of 7
The CFO who signed off on the ERP budget needs visible proof that the investment is working. A phased rollout delivers proof every 6 to 10 weeks: AP automation is live and the clerk is doing exception handling instead of data entry; the warehouse team scanned 400 picks today without a paper ticket; the sales team...
Bonus
A phased rollout only works if the partner running it has a real methodology. Six questions that separate disciplined execution from slide-deck promises:
Read next
Full guide on octurasolutions.com