Here are all the essential ERP and Odoo news of November that you should not miss.
News from Odoo HQ
Official updates and posts from Odoo's headquarters, Odoo employees and the partner network.
Odoo Business Shows get industry-specific
Odoo is sharpening its own event series. Where a mock IKEA shop used to serve as the all-purpose demo, Odoo will now walk through individual industries and the way they actually work. much. will be there as a partner.
An official skills directory for AI coding agents
Odoo has added an official skills directory to its GitHub repository. It teaches AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Copilot CLI, Codex and OpenCode to review and write Odoo code the way Odoo itself does. Inside: one skill for code reviews, one for security audits (sudo misuse, SQL and domain injection, RPC exposure, XSS) and two for the coding guidelines in core and web code. Anyone building on Odoo with agents now has the vendor's own yardstick right in the repo. Ray Carnes was among the first to point it out.
Odoo is building a Munich office
Odoo is opening a location in Munich and is hiring for it right now: business analysts, account managers, partner account managers and a Sales Manager / Business Advisor DACH. As Munich neighbours ourselves, we are watching this one closely.
News from the ERP world
Headlines from the ERP world you shouldn't miss.
MCP: how many ERP systems can actually talk to an AI
10 of the 36 ERP systems on the DACH market can now be connected to an AI. In March it was three. For 17 systems there is no route at all, neither from the vendor nor through a partner, according to a count by Max Mittelstaedt (ERP Checker). In any ERP selection, four questions separate the label from the function:
- Does the MCP server come from the vendor or from a third party?
- Can the AI only read, or can it also create documents?
- Do the ERP's user permissions also apply to the AI?
- What does usage cost, including after the beta phase?
If you want to run those four questions against Odoo, our Odoo MCP server page has the answers.
ERP projects at mid-sized firms: the bottleneck is people, not budget
86% of 150 surveyed manufacturing companies name a lack of internal resources as the biggest hurdle to introducing or modernising an ERP system. They still intend to invest: 64% are budgeting for ERP, digitalisation or process automation over the next two years. That makes the shape of the project decisive: whoever brings the business departments and day-to-day operations in only at rollout pays for it later.
Xentral: a change at the top and a strained balance sheet
At Xentral, founder Benedikt Sauter has reportedly been removed from day-to-day operations, leaving Domenico Cipolla to run the company alone. Sauter confirms the change but denies that a follow-on financing round has stalled: "We still have enough money."
The latest published figures (2024):
- Revenue: €14.5 million (+22%)
- Net loss: €9.4 million
- Cash: down from €39.6 million to €32.1 million
- Funding raised from investors including Sequoia and Tiger Global: around US$95 million, last round in August 2021
Five years without a new round say more about the market than about Xentral: venture capital is hard to come by in ERP right now, and the competition increasingly includes Odoo and home-built AI solutions.
News from much.
What's new at much. Consulting this month.
Our podcast is live: "Who Changed the System?"
Episode 1 is online, with Simon Stappen and Samuel Reinhardt. Listen to episode 1. From now on the podcast comes out monthly: conversations with people who have actually rebuilt their company's IT. What worked, what went wrong, and everything in between.
We are looking for guests for the coming episodes. If you have pushed through a change in your own ERP or IT landscape, get in touch.