Choosing an Odoo Implementation Partner in Jakarta: 7 Questions to Ask

There are roughly 30 Odoo partners advertising in Jakarta right now. Maybe 8 of them have actually shipped more than a handful of implementations. The shortlist process matters more than the contract negotiation, because once you’ve signed and they’ve started, switching partners mid-project is its own catastrophe.

These are the seven questions we’d ask if we were on the buyer side. None of them are gotchas. They’re the questions a partner who knows what they’re doing will answer comfortably and a partner who doesn’t will hedge on.

1. “How many production Odoo systems are you maintaining today?”

Implementations are easy to count and easy to inflate. “We’ve done 40 implementations” might mean 40 demos, 12 starts, and 6 systems that actually run.

The number that matters is how many businesses are using Odoo every day with this partner supporting them. If the answer is under 10, you’re paying for a learning curve. If it’s over 50, the partner might be stretched and your account will be handled by someone junior.

The sweet spot for an Indonesian SME: a partner with 15–40 active clients, at least 5 of them in your industry or close to it.

2. “Can I talk to two of your clients from the last 18 months?”

Watch the reaction more than the answer. A partner who immediately offers references and lets you contact them directly is confident in the work. A partner who promises to “arrange it” but the calls never happen is hiding something.

When you get on the reference call, ask specifically:

• How far over budget did the project come in?
• How many weeks late was go-live versus the original plan?
• What’s the support response time like now, 6 months in?
• Would they hire this partner again?

The first three questions filter out the partners who don’t actually finish on time. The last one filters out everyone else.

3. “Who specifically will be on my project, and what’s their experience with Odoo?”

Many partners send their best people to the sales meeting and their juniors to your project. Ask for the actual project team: names, roles, allocation percentage, years of Odoo experience.

Specifically watch for two things. First, whether there’s at least one consultant with 3+ years of Odoo experience assigned to your project, not just supervising it. Second, whether the developer doing your customisations is in-house or subcontracted. Subcontracted developers aren’t automatically bad, but communication overhead increases and accountability gets murky.

If the answer to “who’s on my project” is vague, the project is being staffed reactively after you sign.

4. “Show me a customisation you’ve built. How did you decide whether to use Studio, a custom module, or to recommend a process change instead?”

This question separates partners who default to customisation (and the bills that come with it) from partners who actually try to fit the standard system to your business first.

A good answer sounds like: “We looked at what the user actually needed, checked whether Odoo’s standard flow could do it with a small Studio tweak, and only built a custom module when the workflow was fundamentally different from what Studio supports. Here’s an example from a client where we talked them out of a Rp 80 juta customisation by reconfiguring their approval workflow instead.”

A bad answer sounds like: “We can build anything you need.” That’s not a yes, that’s a willingness to invoice.

5. “How do you handle Indonesian localisation specifically?”

You’re not buying generic Odoo. You’re buying Odoo that has to produce e-Faktur output, calculate PPh withholding correctly, handle BPJS payroll if relevant, and survive a tax audit. The localisation work is non-trivial and lots of partners minimise it.

Ask:

• Do they use the OCA Indonesian localisation, a third-party module, or their own?
• How do they handle e-Faktur output — direct from Odoo, or export to an external e-Faktur app?
• Can they show you a sample tax report that matches the formats your accountant uses?
• Have they worked with your specific industry’s tax characteristics? (Manufacturing has different withholding patterns than services, etc.)

If they say localisation is “easy” or “already included”, drill down on the specifics. The partners who actually know localisation have war stories about it.

6. “What does ongoing support look like after go-live?”

This is the question that catches the most partners off-guard, because the support model after go-live is where many implementations quietly fail.

Things to find out:

• What’s the response time SLA, and what counts as critical vs non-critical?
• Is support tracked in a ticket system, or does it happen ad-hoc over WhatsApp?
• What’s the hourly rate for non-included work, and what’s the minimum billing increment?
• How are version upgrades handled? Odoo releases yearly. Who plans and executes the upgrade, and what does it typically cost?
• If their lead developer leaves the company, who picks up your account?

A partner with a real support practice will have written answers to most of these. A partner who improvises support will give you handshake-style assurances that mean nothing when something breaks at 8pm on a Friday.

7. “What’s the smallest scope you’d recommend we go live with?”

This is the most important question. The Indonesian Odoo project graveyard is full of implementations that tried to go live with 12 modules at once, hit problems in 3 of them, and stalled the whole thing.

A good partner pushes back against scope. They’ll say things like:

“For your business, I’d go live with Sales, Inventory, and Accounting first. Add Manufacturing and HR three months later, after the first set is stable. The CRM you mentioned probably doesn’t replace your current sales process — let’s revisit that after go-live.”

A bad partner agrees to whatever you ask for. They want a bigger contract. The result will be a bigger contract that delivers less working software.

When a partner pushes back on your scope, that’s a sign they care more about a successful implementation than a fat invoice. That’s the partner you want.

What to do with the answers

Run these seven questions against each shortlisted partner. Score them honestly. Then compare the prices.

The cheapest partner who answers seven questions well will outperform the priciest partner who hedges on three. Implementation quality compounds — a good first phase makes the next year easier, a bad first phase eats the next two years of operational capacity.

If you’re putting together your Odoo partner shortlist and want a sanity check on which questions matter most for your specific situation, we’ll spend an hour walking through it with you. No selling, no follow-up sequence — just an honest call.