Sales and Finance Are Supposed to Be the Center of Gravity
Walk into most conversations about Odoo and the assumption is baked in: it's a sales-and-invoicing system first, everything else is a module you bolt on. For one manufacturer running a full Odoo deployment, that assumption is backwards. Their installed-app profile is manufacturing, planning and quality heavy. Sales and finance are the thin layer on top, not the center.
What the App List Actually Says
Look at where the real customization effort went: production orders, bills of materials, quality checkpoints, work centers, an external scheduling system kept in sync in both directions. Finance runs mostly on Odoo's defaults. Nobody spent weeks tailoring the invoicing flow, because invoicing was never the hard problem here. Getting the shop floor, the schedule and the quality gates to agree with each other was.
Why It Matters Beyond One Company
For a factory, the ERP's job isn't to record that a sale happened. It's to be the system that knows what's being built, in what sequence, against what quality standard, synced with whatever planning tool the floor actually trusts. Treat that as an afterthought and you end up with a system that's excellent at invoicing and constantly out of step with what's actually happening in production. This is the kind of asymmetry Majorbird looks for before writing a single line of configuration: what does this business actually run on, not what does an ERP demo assume it runs on.
The Takeaway
If you're evaluating or configuring Odoo for a manufacturer, don't start from the sales funnel. Start from the floor. Where the real customization budget goes tells you what the business actually is.