Digital tools: the silent engine of modern business
Digital tools are the driving force behind key business processes, and keeping them up to date enables companies to respond quickly to new market demands, take advantage of the latest technological innovations, and ensure secure, efficient, and scalable operations.
In a world where technology advances at a dizzying pace, software maintenance becomes a critical factor for business competitiveness. Having an up-to-date system not only means access to new features, but also ensures a robust infrastructure capable of integrating with new solutions and meeting the highest standards of security and performance. For this reason, adopting a culture of continuous maintenance is not optional, it’s a strategic necessity.
The continuous evolution of Odoo as a competitive advantage
In this context, Odoo stands out as a solid and constantly evolving platform. Every year, it releases a new version packed with innovative features and significant improvements that boost business productivity and efficiency. These versions not only introduce new functionalities but also include key enhancements in security, performance, technological compatibility, and user experience.
However, taking full advantage of these improvements is not always straightforward, especially when existing implementations contain numerous customizations. If these customizations are not properly maintained, updates become complex, slow, and expensive, often requiring as much effort and investment as a brand-new implementation.
If you're interested in exploring more about how software is evolving and the key trends that will shape the future, we recommend this article: 8 Software Development Trends 2025.
Open Source and Maintenance: The OCA's Vision
We firmly believe in a clear philosophy: while customizations can be valuable, they must be maintained under high-quality standards that are sustainable over time. This vision is part of our long-term commitment, which you can learn more about on our “About US”. That’s why we promote a continuous maintenance strategy based on the open-source philosophy, which ensures the system’s ongoing evolution.
Keeping your code up to date and regularly maintained offers significant advantages:
- Compatibility with new Odoo versions: Enables you to take advantage of core improvements without breaking existing functionalities.
- Enhanced security: New versions address known vulnerabilities, providing better protection for your data and operations.
- Improved performance: The optimizations introduced in each Odoo version allow your system to run more smoothly and efficiently.
- Reduced technical debt: Keeping the code clean and aligned with standards prevents the buildup of issues that can hinder future development.
- Scalability ensured: A well-maintained system is ready to grow alongside your business, without technical friction.
By actively contributing to communities such as the OCA (Odoo Community Association), we not only ensure that customizations are continuously updated, validated, and compatible with future versions, but also leverage a powerful tool for Odoo implementation partners. The OCA acts as a collective review environment, where the community contributes to improving the design of custom features and adopts those developments with general value, making long-term maintenance easier. This allows customized code to evolve alongside Odoo’s core, making it possible to update both the base version of the system and our own addons seamlessly..
Design matters: sustainable and reusable customizations
An essential part of ensuring agile and cost-effective maintenance lies in the very design of customizations. In our team, we believe that customizations should, whenever possible, enhance the product in a generic way,that is, by adding features that can be useful to more than one company.
This approach not only helps reduce maintenance costs but also makes it easier to integrate with future versions of the system. The more generic and aligned a development is with the best practices of the Odoo ecosystem, the easier it will be to maintain, test, and evolve over time.
In addition, sustainable design allows those improvements to be shared with the community, strengthening the Odoo ecosystem and benefiting from the collective knowledge contributed by other developers and businesses.
By taking this approach, we promote that every customization or development follows open and rigorous standards, not only making annual updates easier but also generating sustained and scalable value for our clients.
Investing in maintenance is not just a best practice, it’s a smart strategy to keep your Odoo ERP at the forefront, efficient, and ready to adapt quickly to the ever-changing needs of your business.
Do you need help calculating the maintenance of your Odoo?
If you need to understand how to assess the state of your customizations, estimate the effort required for an upgrade, or design a sustainable maintenance strategy, feel free to contact us.
Transparency: a requirement of open source
The open-source ecosystem brings a fundamental added value: transparency. When a development is published in an open environment like the OCA, it is exposed to the scrutiny of the community. This not only raises the quality standard but also makes it easy to identify when a development is well-designed, aligned with best practices, and based on reusable design principles.
That’s why, when a customization isn’t aligned with this philosophy, it’s worth asking: how well-designed is this development? Transparency demands that things be done right from the very beginning.
Technical resources and useful examples
Here are some useful links to help you estimate maintenance and better understand how to design sustainable customizations in Odoo:
How to Keep Your Odoo Updated and Competitive