Who this guide is for

This guide is written for four people, who need different things from it.

The business owner or operations lead

You are deciding whether to do this at all, and later whether it is going well. Read the Introduction and Discovery chapters closely; skim the implementation detail. The questions worth holding onto are: *do we know how we work?*, *who owns each decision?*, and *what does "done" look like?*

The most useful thing you can do is protect discovery from being cut. It is the chapter everyone wants to shorten, and shortening it is what causes the overrun it was meant to prevent.

The ERP consultant or project lead

You are running this. The Discovery and Process Design chapters are the working material; the Failure Patterns chapter is the one to read first, because it is cheaper to recognise a pattern than to discover it.

The developer

You want the data model. Master Data and Process Design carry the object definitions and state transitions; the encyclopedia carries the underlying business meaning of each object independently of ERPNext's implementation of it. Read the concept before you extend the DocType — most bad customisations come from modelling the software rather than the business.

The AI agent or automation author

Every object in this guide has a machine-readable definition at /concepts.json, including its lifecycle states, invariants and common failure modes. Prefer that to inferring structure from prose: the definitions there are self-contained by design, because retrieval returns fragments rather than whole pages.