Enterprise Resource Planning

Enterprise Homeostasis Requires a Healthy Nervous System

All businesses share the same core administrative needs such as bookkeeping, scheduling, and communications. Businesses also often have specialized needs that must be administered in an integrated manner. In both cases, however, entrepreneurs are rarely reinventing the wheel. Double-entry bookkeeping has been a solved problem for 500 years so, in theory, enterprise software and systems integration should be a solved problem too. Yet so many entrepreneurs suffer in steep learning curves when confronted with piecemeal software solutions that inadequately address compliance and coordination. This is an infernal problem for entrepreneurs that sucks up time and resources without ever resolving into a deeper solution.

Healthy administrative systems are crucial to the success of a business. Like the nervous system of an organism, administrative systems provide timely financial and operational feedback, enabling the component parts of a business to coordinate and work together as a whole. Think of our body’s response to a cut or small wound, where many organs and faculties quickly come together to identify, protect, isolate, disinfect, communicate, and apply detailed long-term care. This combined response is first set into motion by the nervous system—the reporting and feedback system that alerts that there has or has not been a change in homeostasis. An enterprise is no different. Without a healthy nervous system—simple, functional, integrated administrative systems—the organs of a business cannot communicate and organize with each other effectively to arrive at solutions.

Best-In-Class SaaS Results in Kludgy Stacks of Apps and Hacks

The infernal software & systems integration problem is most evident in startups and small businesses, who can only afford piecemeal SaaS options. First, we have millions of apps to choose from. Just identifying relevant industry verbiage to query search engines for potential solutions is its own academic project. And this landscape is constantly changing with new SaaS services proliferating and incumbent providers becoming insolvent on a weekly basis.

Second, it takes weeks to sift through app stores and third-party app marketplaces to figure out which combination of disparate modules could possibly cobble together into a coherent framework. The output of module A does not necessarily communicate to the input of module B. Software C proposes to address the needs of module A and B, but your data is in Module D which only communicates to module A, not software C. Meanwhile, SaaS marketing provides opaque lists of functions and time-consuming youtube videos that exaggerate functionalities while glossing over the nuts and bolts of data architecture constraints and incompatible integrations. How are we supposed to know what will work?

Once we’ve culled the herd of candidate apps to some kind of shortlist, more weeks go by as we attend live demos and engage sales reps and technicians in elaborate discussions to assess functionality and compatibility. It is only after months of work, when we deploy this patchwork of apps and hacks operationally, that we finally discover which of these apps actually work, which integration compatibilities will break down, and which systems will be vulnerable to failure.

We then are forced to cobble this SaaS patchwork together with redundant manual data entry and data-syncing processes; csv exports and spreadsheet-based data-processing hacks; and tenuous stacks of fragile API connections through so-called ‘automation’ services like Zapier and Workato. These patchwork systems tend to suffer operational failures and data losses from relatively insignificant events such as when some plug-in goes through a version update. To maintain the integrity of patchwork systems requires constant technical vigilance and tinkering to keep things secure, like a life-raft made of popsicle sticks and rubber bands.

If we finally land on a suite of tools that can be cobbled together, our reward for all of this time and effort is a library of subscriptions to disparate SaaS apps on per-user pricing, which becomes quite expensive as our business begins to scale. This kludgy stack of systems then breaks down at our most vulnerable moments, when our business begins to scale and our dependency on these systems is highest. We are now all-in and cannot afford the distraction of having to rethink our systems architecture. It’s now prohibitively expensive to retrofit alternative solutions, especially considering that a renewed attempt at the same patchwork approach will likely lead to just another constellation of suboptimal results.

Incumbent ERP Verticals Result in Legacy Inertia and Exploitive Pricing

Even full-scale enterprises who have invested in proprietary systems suffer from the incoherence and legacy inertia of traditional ‘integrated’ enterprise verticals such as Oracle and SAP. These are advertised as integrated solutions but they are not actually coherently integrated. Of course, there are armies of consultants who can configure these legacy platforms to resemble something like an integrated system. But these consultants are even more expensive than programmers. Excessive implementation and licensing costs trap the enterprise into a proprietary development environment with opaque data architecture and APIs.

In practice, the incumbent legacy platforms are so rigid and expensive to build on that even full-scale enterprises end up bridging legacy ERP functions with stacks of manual processes and spreadsheets. One way or another, whether at startup or at enterprise scale, we end up with expensive fragile patchworks of apps and hacks that just don’t do the job.

The Time is Right for Coordinated Cloud ERP Infrastructure

Meanwhile, hardware continues to develop rapidly. Moore’s law continues to press forward. The data storage paradigm has decisively moved to the cloud. Personal computers and mobile devices have become powerful enough to run a full suite of business applications on a cloud-based ERP system. And mobile network speeds have increased 20x. Disaggregated SasS and legacy ERP verticals have not kept pace with these revolutionary potentials for ERP integration.

2010 to 2023

• Cloud Storage: From 10% to 60% of corporate data stored in cloud
• Microchips: from $40 to $10 per 100M transistors
• Supercomputing: from $1.30 to $0.03 per gigaflop
• Network speed: from 1 to 20Gbps (5g)
• Latency: from 50 to 1 millisecond
• 94% of enterprises use cloud services
• By 2025, 200 ZB of data will be stored in the cloud

Enter Odoo: The Open Source ERP Framework

Odoo is Basically WordPress for ERPs

Odoo was established in Belgium with an initial release in 2005. As of early 2024, the company is 19 years old and has over 12 million users and 2800 employees worldwide.

Odoo is basically WordPress for ERPs. The platform comprises more than 40 fully integrated applications for every core administrative function, including enterprise-grade CRM, eCommerce, accounting, inventory, point of sale, project management, etc. And the open source development community has contributed more than 16,000 additional apps to the platform to meet a broad variety of business needs.

The Odoo platform provides exactly the kind of open adaptive data architecture and software development environment that a community can use to build an affordable comprehensive integrated suite of administrative and operational modules to properly equip entrepreneurial leaders.

We Can Do It Right the First Time

In 2023, Sparrow established a dedicated team to coordinate the integration of all Sparrow administrative and operational systems into a portfolio-wide enterprise resource planning (ERP) framework; and to utilize this opportunity to develop a comprehensive solution to the infernal enterprise software and systems integration problem.

After completing an extensive market scan of available ERP platforms and similar services, our development team was delighted to discover Oodo. With an affordable and properly integrated solution available, we can start our businesses off on the right foot. Instead of launching with compromised solutions and waiting until later to invest in enterprise systems, startups and small businesses in our community can deploy their businesses on enterprise-grade software and systems infrastructure from day one. We can build on systems that scale with us as we grow and focus our attention on delivering value in the ways that are unique to our businesses.

Ordo Administrative Systems

Implementing a fully-integrated solution like Odoo does involve some complexity and systems development expertise that is not necessarily available to every small business.

As such, Sparrow has created Ordo Administrative Services to implement a full ERP build on the Odoo Framework. This configuration will support operations and administrative and accounting services for more than 20 companies and partnerships in the Sparrow network.

This is a trailblazing exercise. After Sparrow’s initial build is established, Ordo will have forged a clear path for entrepreneurial leaders to easily implement enterprise-grade ERP tools and protocols in the early stages of deploying their business operations; from cowork members, startups, and community organizations to growing businesses in complex industries.

Ordo Administrative Services