I spoke at Fukuoka Integration X's online event on 7 February. The slides from the talk are posted here. Perhaps reflecting the growing interest in Odoo in Japan, this was the third time in six months that I have been asked to speak at an outside online event.
The message at the centre of my talks is almost always the same: encouraging open source activity. In practice it is a subject most business people are unfamiliar with, so I always end up spending time on background — but that alone does not make clear what OSS activity actually improves. So this time, for the problems you tend to run into using Odoo in Japan, I explained concrete solutions using OSS while working through Odoo itself.
Don't you find that the examples appearing in an IT provider's presentation are all of the "if you want this solution, sign up for our service" variety? Well, of course. Providers would go hungry otherwise.
But Quartile does not give presentations like that. It is partly a matter of pride for a player engaged in open source activity: solutions to an OSS product's problems should be built in the open and shared in the open. All the more so while the product is still developing against what the market needs.
So this time I tried the following: working through a demo scenario on Odoo Community Edition (16.0) with standard features only, and dealing with the concrete problems that come up, mainly using OCA modules. The demo scenario was "an agency receives an enquiry for office chairs, issues a quotation, places a purchase order once it wins the order, receives the goods and creates stock, then ships and invoices" — and within that I also covered printing documents and communicating in the chatter. Incidentally, the reason I did not use the latest Odoo (17.0) is that OCA modules had not yet caught up with 17.0.
The solutions I covered are as follows.
| No. | Problem | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Address fields are laid out in the overseas order | Install the l10n_jp_address_layout OCA module |
| 2 | Prefecture names are in the Latin alphabet | Install the l10n_jp_country_state OCA module |
| 3 | Want to reduce the effort of typing addresses by hand | Install the l10n_jp_partner_zip_address OCA module |
| 4 | "Japan" shows in the customer address on printed documents | Adjust the country definition |
| 5 | Printed documents do not carry 御中 after the addressee | Install the l10n_jp_partner_title_qweb OCA module |
| 6 | Remove the decimal places shown for quantities and unit prices on printed documents | Install the report_qweb_decimal_precision OCA module |
| 7 | Company details on printed documents are in Japanese only | Install the report_company_details_translatable OCA module |
| 8 | Want the invoice email sent to the accounts contact as well | Install the standard module base_automation and add an automated action record |
| 9 | Want to check the accounting entries | Add the user to the "Show Full Accounting Features" group |
I set the presentation a rather grand theme, "advancing DX in Japan", but to advance DX in any real sense, I believe it will matter more and more that users actively make use of open source solutions and that providers actively engage in open source activity. We cannot advance DX in Japan by ourselves, but we should be able to give people an opening to encounter open source in the ERP and core business systems space.
Every one of the OCA modules listed here is, I think, a feature that would be better present by default when using Odoo in Japan, so please do make use of them. There are no licence fees, so there is no reason not to. And if anything strikes you while using the modules, please do open an issue in the OCA repository and give feedback (Odoo providers especially). Doing so grows the community assets for using Odoo more effectively.
Incidentally, every OCA module introduced here was written by Quartile. As of writing, there are unfortunately no dependable open source features — meaning ones added to OCA — from any other Odoo provider in Japan. At the next opportunity like this, it would be good to be able to introduce community modules from other providers. When that happens, I expect DX in Japan will have begun to advance a little, and I am looking forward to it.
Speaking at Fukuoka Integration X's online event