Custom ERPNext for Manufacturing and Solar Operations

The challenge

ERPNext was in place but only partly used. Quotations, project tracking, and operational handoffs happened in spreadsheets and email because the standard workflows did not match how the business quoted, manufactured, and installed. Every report meant reconciling two sources, and neither was trusted.

The approach

1. 01

   Mapped the real process first, including the steps people had invented outside the system, because those steps are the requirement.

2. 02

   Built custom doctypes and workflow states that match how this industry actually quotes, schedules, and installs, rather than bending the process to fit stock ERPNext.

3. 03

   Wired ERPNext to the surrounding tools with automation, so records move between systems without anyone retyping them.

4. 04

   Added role-based views and reports so each team sees its own work instead of a general-purpose list.

5. 05

   Kept the customisations upgrade-safe, because an ERP fork that cannot take an update becomes a liability within a year.

Architecture

What was hard

• Customising an ERP without forking it. Every change had to survive an upgrade, which rules out the fastest way to do most of them.

• The real process lived outside the system. The spreadsheet steps people had invented were the requirement, and gathering them meant watching the work rather than reading the documentation.

• Permissions turned out to be the hard design problem. Sales, production, and installation needed different views of the same record, and getting that wrong either blocks people or exposes numbers they should not see.

Related

• Workflow automation
• AI lead pipeline