The whole story, from the beginning.
After a decade operating the same business systems, I’m now leading their replacement.
Some background. I’m Information Systems Director at a national industrial supplier with decades of history and half a million SKUs. When I arrived in 2015, the storefront ran on classic ASP against a custom Oracle system built in the early 2000s. That stack was later replaced with an off-the-shelf ERP suite, and I spent years running the systems that decision produced — every quirk, every workaround, every 2 a.m. lesson about what breaks at volume.
Now we’re migrating the whole operation to Odoo, and I’m the architect this time.
This log documents the build as it happens — the decisions, the dead ends, and the working systems: data migration out of legacy databases, custom Odoo modules, Algolia-powered catalog search, and the applied-AI modules we’re building along the way (product data enrichment with confidence-gated human review, catalog digitization, camera-assisted receiving in the warehouse).
Few things sharpen ERP judgment like living with a system from the inside — first as the operator who inherited it, now as the architect responsible for what comes next.