Odoo is a serious product with an enormous app ecosystem, a large partner network and a free community edition. If you need ecommerce, retail POS, project management, recruitment and manufacturing under one roof, that breadth is real and we can't match it.
If your problem is that fifty people on a shop floor are working off registers and nobody knows where an order is, breadth isn't what you need.
Should an Indian factory use Odoo or a dedicated manufacturing ERP?
Horizontal against vertical
This is the actual distinction, and everything else follows from it.
Odoo built a platform that serves every kind of business, then added a manufacturing app to it. The manufacturing module therefore has to be generic enough to work for a bakery, a furniture maker and a pharma unit, which means it starts specific enough to be useful to none of them until somebody configures it.
We built for Indian SME manufacturing and nothing else. A stone processing plant and a cable plant get different configurations out of the box, because we've deployed in both and the differences aren't cosmetic. A gang saw assembly job card and a copper drawing line batch card have almost nothing in common beyond the word "card."
Neither approach is wrong. It's a choice about whether you'd rather have one system that does many things adequately, or one that does your thing properly and syncs to Tally for the rest.
The upgrade problem
Worth understanding before you commit, because it catches people about two years in.
Odoo releases a major version annually. Customisations written against one version frequently need rework for the next. Plants that customised heavily either pay for that rework repeatedly or stop upgrading, and stopping means falling behind on security and support.
This is a known characteristic of the platform rather than a defect, and good partners plan for it. Ask yours specifically what an upgrade costs and how often it will be needed. Get the answer in writing before you sign.
What sector configuration buys you
Two plants, both live on Facto, both in Rajasthan, and their systems look nothing alike.
At Karm Machine Tools, the unit of work is a machine build that runs for weeks across fabrication, machining and assembly, so the job card carries operations, drawings and crane movements. At BMI Cables, the unit is a production run against a cable specification with a conductor size, core count, insulation type and voltage grade, so the batch card carries test values against IS and IEC standards and a drum number at the end of it.
Both configurations shipped. Neither was assembled from a blank framework over four months by somebody billing for the time.
Both of those rollouts are published in full, with the parts that went slowly left in: BMI Cables and Karm Machine Tools.
Facto brought structure and visibility across departments. Our order execution and production tracking are far more controlled now.P. K. Agarwal, PPS International
The Tally point, which decides more deals than it should
Most of our customers keep Tally for books and use Facto for the floor. Odoo generally wants to be the accounting system too.
That's a bigger internal sell than it looks on a feature sheet. A promoter and a CA who have used Tally for fifteen years are being asked to move their books, their returns and their history, on top of a shop-floor project that hasn't proved itself yet. Two changes at once is one of the mistakes that leaves an ERP bought and unused. Our page on Facto vs Tally and Excel sets out how the sync works instead.
For a wider view of the category before you shortlist, the guide to manufacturing software in India covers cost, rollout time and an eight-point checklist. If the open-source route is what appeals, Facto vs ERPNext is the closer comparison.
