ERPNext is free! It has lot of features that can get you started without need of any help.
Documentation, forum and checking code base can get you through your implementation.
If the company implementing this is a startup or a greenfield project with tech savvy management,
implementing and customizing ERPNext is a breeze. Most of us from the community have implemented the system on our own.
For migrating from legacy software to ERPNext is also an upgrade for many and can be a DIY project.
List of Frappe/ERPNext features that makes service providers redundant.
- It is self-implementable.
- Low code meta data driven makes it easy to customize.
- UI/UX is intuitive.
- Server Infrastructure can be as simple or as complex as needed.
- Official Mobile app.
- List of promising integrations come out of the box.
- Monolith, you install it and get everything.
Then what are we here for?
Answers! We are here for solutions and answers that solve our customer’s pain.
We come into picture when no sustainable answer is found anywhere else.
Customer has already tried things and found out the limitations, that is where we come up.
We are here when the self-implementation, meta-data low code phase is over and there is a need of real, sustainable, practical answers.
I personally would like to save some customer’s money.
Yet I only benefit when customer has already spent some money in community, played around with doctype, failed and clearly identified the limitations. Upto then things are very rosy and everything can be solved with DocType and frappe framework.
This is not really beneficial for us as well as the potential customer.
What I have observed over a period,
- Company hires a person to implement ERPNext (champion)
- Champion gets overwhelmed with low code, DocType, Workflow, Custom Script, Reports, Server Script and many more features from frappe framework.
- No one goes live.
- No actual problem is solved.
- Six months to two years are wasted.
- Option 1: Champion is fired, company implements Microsoft Dynamics or gives the contract to TCS (or similar situation arises).
- Option 2: Champion is promoter / team member, can’t be fired. Loves ERPNext, so finds us.
This is where our approach really solves the pain. Our focus is to solve customer’s problem, we really don’t focus on selling any product. If a product doesn’t solve the problem, either we’ll find something that solves the problem or build a layer of abstraction that can bridge the gap.
Our Approach:
- We will try to identify customer’s happy path
- Once identified we setup a staging / UAT server for customer to test out the happy path
- Customer’s test users can give feedback on issues, video calls or any preferable channel.
- We improve things as per feedback and the loop continues.
- In cases where we face a roadblock or technical bottleneck, we will come up with multiple approaches.
- We will try the approaches one by one to solve the problem.
- We promise to deliver a solution and we are resilient to solve customer’s problem. We won’t give up, we will give a solution.
- Because of seamless user collaboration we can come up with things that can solve the pain area with combination of software, programming and user interventions.
Once this process of conversational software development begins we ensure there is no loss of translation between end user and developer. This process is very fast with daily releases and interactions. Check out our customer projects and interactions on gitlab.com/castlecraft
What about Agile TM?
We believe in:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
We prefer calling it conversational software development, because it encourages conversation.
What about SCRUM or Stand-ups?
Getting on a call is not more important than delivering results. In fact we believe NOW is the right time for call. If at all our developers, customers or users feel the need to communicate, just drop a message over any channel and connect as fast as possible. It saves time and deliver results faster.
What about sprints?
We are in constant collaboration with customer, we release multiple times a day. Seven day sprints are too long for daily release schedules.
If there is a big chunk of feature to be delivered at once, we might take up a week long sprint. Again it is against the principle to deliver small incremental features and is mostly avoided.
What about Kanban, Story board?
We focus on clarity in communication and we encourage customer to speak up it their own domain language instead of forcing upon tools for them to use. If customer is happy with a simple checklist on issues, we do that. If customer needs kanban or event storming, we’ll do that. We don’t intend to intimidate the customer with any tools that may be new for their domain.