We replaced Odoo with an ERP we built in a week

This summer we stopped paying for Odoo. Since September, dozens of people at FusionWorks log thousands of hours a month, run the CRM, plan resources and manage contracts in Ops — our own ERP, built by our automated development pipeline in one week in August and tested by the team for two.

We replaced Odoo with our own system. Every company will. Generic software you rent is being replaced by software built for you, and we happened to go first. Here is how it went, and how to do it yourself.

What Odoo did for us, and what it didn’t

Odoo was our ERP for years: timesheets, CRM, planning, contracts, projects. A decent product. The problem is not Odoo. The problem is generic software.

Every SaaS has two feature lists. The first is what you pay for and never open. The second is what you need and cannot get. The second list is the expensive one.

For us the second list looked like this:

• validation of hours against each person’s real capacity, not a hard-coded 8-hour day
• a project margin that connects rates, cost and logged time in one place
• a way for our AI assistants to work with the CRM and planning directly, without an integrator in between

Adding any of these to Odoo meant an integrator, a quote and a month. We asked twice. Then we stopped asking.

Why this was irrational three years ago

Building your own ERP was a corporate luxury. It meant six months, three engineers and a system nobody wanted to maintain afterwards. Buying was the only rational choice, and we made it — like everyone else.

With AI-native development the math flipped. What made the week possible is the way we build everything now — our 24*7 development framework: an automated pipeline where agents write code through the night and engineers direct, review and take responsibility in the morning. 168 hours a week, not a month. We described the modules on a Monday. One week later Ops was running with real data. Two weeks later the whole team had tested and polished it. In September we switched.

The cost of building dropped by an order of magnitude. But the bigger change is the cost of changing. A new field, a new report, a new rule used to be a project. Now it is a conversation before lunch.

None of this is specific to a software company. A logistics firm, a clinic, a law office, a manufacturer — each runs on three or four generic systems it tolerates. Each can now have its own.

What we actually got

• Only the features we use. CRM, timesheets, resource planning, contracts, directory. Nothing else on the screen.
• Changes in hours. Our fixes ship the same day. A vendor’s roadmap no longer decides what our Tuesday looks like.
• Our data in our database. Every report, every export, every integration is ours.
• A system built for AI too. Ops has an MCP endpoint. “Who is free next week?” is a question Claude answers from Planning, not from a guess — and it can log the answer back.

What broke

Honesty is part of the story. On day one most of the team had no login — we had forgotten an invite flow. A validation error wiped a whole form. Typing 0 in a timesheet cell did nothing.

All of it was fixed within days, because the fix was ours to make. One week to build. A month to make it boring.

And it didn’t stop at Odoo. In October our HR tool — vacations, sick leaves, remote days — moves into Ops as well. Two subscriptions, one system built for us.

Now we do this for other companies

Every company has its Odoo: the HR tool nobody likes, the CRM with forty unused fields, the spreadsheet with macros that one person understands. You tolerate it because building your own was irrational. It isn’t anymore.

Here is what we offer.

A system built for you, quickly. We build with your stakeholders in the room, on the same 24*7 pipeline that built Ops: agents through the night, engineers in the morning. Week one — build. Weeks two and three — your team tests, we fix daily. Week four — run in parallel with the old system, then cancel the renewal.

Inexpensive. One senior engineer directing the pipeline, not a team on a six-month contract. You pay for the system, not for the features you will never open.

Self-supporting. The system updates itself and suggests new features based on how your team uses it. Your own people can add features — a description is enough; the system does the rest.

A guide, not a lock-in. After delivery we hand over a guide on how your team keeps improving the system on its own. And if you would rather not — we support it.

We did it for ourselves first. Ops is the proof: dozens of people, hundreds of projects, thousands of hours a month, and zero integrators.

The full offer — scope, timeline, what you own at the end — is on our Custom ERP page.