ERP That Survives Contact With Your Operations
Full-cycle ERP consulting and implementation for Vietnamese enterprises: process review, fit-gap analysis, configuration, data migration, training and the support that keeps the system alive after go live.
An ERP project is rarely judged on the software. It is judged on the first Monday after go live, when a warehouse supervisor has forty orders to pick and the new screen asks him for a field he has never heard of. Everything that happens in the six months before that morning exists to make that morning uneventful.
iGlobal has implemented ERP for manufacturers, distributors, logistics providers and service companies across Vietnam. The pattern that separates the projects that work from the ones that quietly get abandoned is not budget and not industry. It is whether the implementation team understood the business process well enough to argue with it, or simply wrote down what they were told and configured that.
We build on Odoo because it covers finance, inventory, manufacturing, sales, purchasing and HR in one database without the licence arithmetic that makes traditional ERP expensive before it is useful. But the platform is a means. What you are buying is the judgement about which of your current practices deserve to be carried forward and which were workarounds for a problem you no longer have.
Why the second ERP attempt is so common
A surprising share of our clients are not buying their first ERP. They are replacing one that was installed, paid for, and then slowly worked around until the real business moved back into spreadsheets. The failure is almost never technical. The system was configured to match an organisation chart rather than a flow of goods and money, so the people doing the work found it faster to keep their own records.
The second pattern is scope by wish list. Every department submits requirements, nobody arbitrates between them, and the project becomes a very expensive attempt to automate disagreement. Six months in, the steering committee is discussing approval matrices instead of whether inventory is accurate.
The third is data. Teams underestimate it every single time. Opening balances, item masters with three spellings of the same supplier, customers who exist twice because one record has the tax code and the other has the delivery address. Migration is where an ERP project either earns trust in the first week or loses it permanently.
- Inventory on the screen and inventory on the rack disagree
- Month end takes two weeks because figures are reassembled by hand
- Each department keeps a private spreadsheet it actually trusts
- Nobody can state gross margin by product line this month
What a complete implementation covers
Process review before software
We walk the floor, follow a real order from quotation to cash, and write down what actually happens rather than what the procedure manual says. The gap between those two is the project.
Fit-gap with honest recommendations
Every requirement is marked standard, configurable or custom development, with the cost of each. Where a practice is a habit rather than a necessity, we say so instead of quoting for it.
Data migration with reconciliation
Master data is cleaned, deduplicated and loaded in test rounds. Opening balances are reconciled against your existing trial balance line by line before anybody signs off on go live.
Integration with what you keep
Customs declarations, bank statements, e-invoice providers, MISA for a finance team that is not moving, the shop floor machines that already work. Replacing everything at once is a choice, not a requirement.
Training by role, not by module
A picker learns the three screens a picker touches, on your data, with your product codes. Generic module training produces certificates; role training produces people who can work on Monday.
Hypercare and then real support
Our consultants sit with your team through the first close and the first full cycle. Afterwards you get a named contact and a response commitment, not a ticket queue in another time zone.
How we deliver it
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1
Discovery and scope 2 to 4 weeks
Process walkthrough by department, data audit, fit-gap register and a phased plan with what is explicitly out of scope for phase one. Anything that cannot be stated plainly here will cost three times more to clarify later.
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2
Configuration and prototype 4 to 10 weeks
We build a working system on a copy of your real data and run your own scenarios through it with your key users, rather than demonstrating a textbook company. Changes made at this stage are cheap.
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3
Migration and user acceptance 3 to 6 weeks
Full data load, reconciliation against existing balances, end-to-end test scripts signed off by the department that owns each process, and role-based training delivered in Vietnamese.
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4
Go live and hypercare 4 to 8 weeks
On-site presence during the first week, daily issue triage, and we stay until the first month end closes inside the system. Handover happens when your team closes a period without us, not on a calendar date.
Who this is for
- Manufacturers and distributors from 30 to 500 staff who have outgrown accounting software
- Groups with several legal entities needing consolidated reporting
- Companies replacing an ERP that was installed but never adopted
- Businesses whose growth is currently limited by manual coordination
Why iGlobal
We argue with the requirement when it deserves it
A vendor who configures exactly what you ask for is cheap to work with and expensive to live with. Part of what you pay us for is to say that a request will cost more than the problem it solves.
Phased delivery with working software early
You see a system running on your own data within weeks, not a slide deck for six months. Each phase has to deliver something usable before the next one is funded.
One team from consulting through support
The consultant who mapped your process is still reachable a year later. Knowledge does not get handed across three companies and lost at each boundary.
The best balance of cost, quality, and service
Open-source licensing keeps the entry cost sane, and our delivery model keeps the implementation cost predictable. You pay for work done, against a scope both sides agreed in writing.
Three ways to do this, compared
| What you are comparing | By hand, on spreadsheets | Off-the-shelf software | With iGlobal |
|---|---|---|---|
| How the different functions connect | They do not; people carry the data between them | Only through the modules the same vendor happens to sell | One database, where each fact is recorded exactly once |
| Changing a process next year | Rewrite the spreadsheet and hope nothing else breaks | Request it, then wait for the vendor roadmap | A change request we scope, quote and deliver |
| A report nobody thought of in advance | Half a day of copying and pasting between files | Available only if the vendor already built it | Built from data already in the system, usually within hours |
| Cost across three years | Hidden inside salaries, so it never appears in a budget | A predictable licence per user, plus the work it cannot do | Quoted per phase and reviewed with you before each one starts |
| Who holds your data | Scattered across files, inboxes and personal phones | On the vendor platform, exported on the vendor's terms | Your own database, exportable in full whenever you ask |
| When something breaks | The person who built the file, if they still work here | A ticket queue, often in another language and time zone | A named engineer in Hanoi you can reach the same working day |
The two middle columns describe approaches that genuinely work for some companies. Where they win, they win, and we have tried to say so.
What changes after go live
The first change is usually not the model, it is that the argument about which number is correct stops. Once the data foundation is in place, finance, operations and sales are reading the same figure, and meetings move from verifying numbers to deciding what to do about them.
The second is that the monthly close stops being an archaeology project. Transactions were captured once, at the moment they happened, by the person who did the work, so accounting is reviewing entries rather than reconstructing them from delivery notes and memory.
The third takes a quarter or two to appear and matters most. Managers start asking better questions. When margin by product line is on a screen rather than in a request to the accounting department, people begin interrogating the business instead of interrogating the report.
- One database instead of a spreadsheet per department
- Month end measured in days rather than weeks
- Stock accuracy high enough to stop counting everything weekly
- Margin visible by product, customer and salesperson
Frequently asked questions
How long does a typical ERP project take?
For a single-entity company of 50 to 150 users covering finance, sales, purchasing and inventory, three to five months to go live is realistic. Manufacturing adds one to three months depending on how complex your routing and costing are. Anyone promising six weeks for all of that is either scoping something much smaller or planning to discover the rest after you have signed.
Do we have to move everything at once?
No, and usually you should not. A common sequence is sales, purchasing and inventory first, finance at the start of the next fiscal period, then manufacturing or HR. Keeping the finance team on their existing software through the first phase is a legitimate choice; we exchange data on a schedule until they are ready.
What happens to our customisations if we upgrade later?
Every customisation we write lives in a separate module with its own source history, never as edits to core code. That is what makes a version upgrade a scoped piece of work rather than a rewrite. We also keep the customisation count down on purpose, because each one is a small permanent tax on every future upgrade.
Can the system handle Vietnamese accounting requirements?
Yes. Chart of accounts per circular, VAT declarations, electronic invoicing through registered providers and the statutory report set are all handled. Where your auditor has a specific presentation preference, that is configuration work we scope during discovery rather than a surprise at year end.
What does ongoing cost look like after go live?
Three lines: hosting, support and change. Hosting is predictable. Support is a monthly retainer sized to your user count and response needs. Change is the one people forget to budget for, and it is the healthiest of the three, because it means the business is still developing and the system is keeping up with it.
Related solutions
Talk to a senior consultant, not a call centre
Tell us what you are trying to fix and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right team for it.