"you could do the same thing for 1% the cost and it'd work better etc."
I used to think that - then I did some work with large scale ERP systems and realised that I was wildly wrong. Fortunately I moved into other areas while I still had some sanity.
Well that's an other thing, when you look at these solutions from afar you often see the core functionality and think it's not a big deal but the devil is always in the details, the millions of small functionalities hidden everywhere for specific tasks is what makes it very hard to compete. Every company has specificities, they want to interface with $external_software, they want to import $arcane_data_format etc... You start by writing a slim and tidy database engine and the next thing you know you have to implement an MS Excel to protobuf converter.
It's easy to underestimate the complexity of an ERP for even a moderately sized company, let alone one the size of LIDL.
Its actually much worse than that. I have considerable experience in a similar class of system, electronic medial records. A common thread I saw in both our PeopleSoft implementation and our EMR implementation was that both are not really packaged products, but platforms to implement our organizations workflows. We were not about to adapt our workflow to some software package so really we buy the product and then spend hundreds of millions using it to encode how we want to operate. By the time you are actually inside the database you typically find a data model that is optimized for flexibility over anything else. So its not really that we need weird connectors, its that we say oh no, we actually have this functionality in this weird department that no one else has with data that is subtlety different from other organizations and a workflow that no one else has. Then repeat that thousands of times.
Every few years, over the past 20 years, I look around to see if there are any open source contenders in the ERP space. There are usually a couple, but you never get to hear about them again. I think it's a difficult space to enter and succeed in and I think most efforts probably underestimate the complexity and isn't funded or run well enough to tackle that adequately.
I've been interested in ERPNext for years and always kept an eye on it as an alternative or replacement for our in-house developed ERP, which currently grows in complexity and may end up at a point where it's too much of a burden for a small team like ours.
One area where ERPNext really seems to be lacking is marketing and presentation. You definitely have the features, but I don't think you're doing a good job of showcasing and documenting them, particualrly before I create an account. You try to show those features in Youtube videos, but the production value doesn't seem to be much higher than a private screencast - I'm worried that this kind of presentation actually hurts you.
Another problem is language support. Last time I checked you worked on community based translation efforts, which resulted in experimental international support. May the quality of the translations has improved since then, and of course I could (and did) help, but without proper doemstic language support (german in my case), there's no way I could use ERPNext with our non-tech, barely english speaking staff.
Other than that I've been intrigued for a long time and wish you would not delete free single user accounts so soon (do they still exist at all?) - I tend to try ERPNext from time to time, with long pauses inbetween, and often have to create a new account.
Did you underestimate the complexity? Did you limit scope to not go insane? What is the typical size/complexity of a typical using company? Could LIDL have used your software for 500M€, could they have even implemented their completely own solution for that money? Thanks!
There have been a few very large implementations of ERPNext. If I were to consult Lidl, we would have done a few low risk pilots, starting with their warehouses or back-office.
I would have gone for a federated architecture where each store / warehouse would have its own system that would then be consolidated at higher levels, rather than going for a mega instance with zillions of transaction rows.
There are many interesting things you can do when you have an open source system you can work to your advantage.
I was curious to learn more about the project, and would like to share some quick feedback; the first thing I noticed was that the first page of the documentation which I opened has multiple spelling and grammar errors:
“Distrobutors have large part of their net worth is invested in the stock in hand. With ERPNext, you can always keep a birds eye view on your stock availability, replineshment, procurement and sales.“
https://erpnext.org/docs/user/manual/en/stock
Second, I noticed that the CI build is failing on GitHub.
I used to think that - then I did some work with large scale ERP systems and realised that I was wildly wrong. Fortunately I moved into other areas while I still had some sanity.