How an e-charging station provider expanded internationally with Odoo

Project Fact Sheet:

The challenge – lack of a future-proof ERP to support a growing multi-entity business

Our customer selected Odoo as the best solution to accompany their growth. They aimed to establish long-lasting processes that could sustain their complex infrastructure, including several new international branches. Their final goal was to leverage integrations with existing systems to better define new and functional processes. 

Our customer required swift and effective solutions to face the following substantial challenges:

• Lacking System Integrations: Our customer faced difficulties integrating their custom backend systems, causing data flow issues.
• Inefficient Invoicing and Payment Processes: Managing invoices and payment reconciliations was a time-consuming task without an efficient system.
• Manufacturing and Purchasing Mismanagement: Our customer required a system that would allow them to handle and steer all their manufacturing and purchasing processes centrally.
• Hindered Scalability: Our customer needed a flexible ERP  that would allow them to accommodate their expanding international operations with new branches planned to be added.
• Undefined Processes: Many operational processes were undefined or underdeveloped, impacting consistency in workflows and across subsidiary management.

The solution – establish processes across subsidiaries with Odoo

To solve their challenges, our customer turned to Odoo 14. They aimed to improve and simplify tasks, from manufacturing to invoicing, to ensure consistency and smoothly integrate new branches.

1. Implementation of Odoo Enterprise apps

We leveraged Odoo 14 apps such as, Sales, Inventory, MRP, Purchase, Employees & Contract and Accounting & Invoicing, driving our customer to accomplish the following:

• Efficient Invoicing and Payments: Through the integration with our customer’s backend, we automated invoicing processes and streamlined payment reconciliation, making our customer’s financial operations more efficient.
• Improved Manufacturing Management: We introduced solutions to our customer to help our customer in better implementing and managing manufacturing processes.
• Scalable Multi-company Setup: We implemented a base ERP system for our customer’s German headquarters and provided key user training. This allowed for easy integration of new subsidiaries into the existing Odoo system as a result of an already developed base structure.
• Smooth Consolidation of Multiple Subsidiaries: Leveraging this implementation, we seamlessly added four more subsidiaries (Germany, Spain, UK, Sweden) to our customer’s existing system. This equipped them to better adjust a stable system to their ongoing business growth.

2. Seamless Odoo integrations with 3rd-party systems

Acknowledging our customer’s reliance on their existing systems and data, we seamlessly integrated their previous solutions with Odoo:

• E-Charging Management Software: We successfully integrated their existing e-charging management system into Odoo. This helped them to not only maintain existing operations but also streamline any associated processes
• Manufacturing Backend Software: We built a custom integration with our customer’s existing manufacturing backend system. In doing so, our customer was able to consolidate their multi-subsidiary manufacturing process in a single system.
• GetMyInvoices: We integrated GetMyInvoices into our customer’s Odoo environment to facilitate the retrieval of invoice documents. This allowed our customer to save time in managing invoices but also link that information to Odoo modules and successfully connect their invoicing and payment reconciliation processes.

The result – establishing end-to-end processes for successful international expansion 

As they adopted Odoo into their daily functioning, our customer immediately experienced substantial benefits:

• Efficient Invoicing and Payment Reconciliation: Following Odoo implementation, our customer noticed a significant improvement in their invoicing and payment reconciliation process. This made their financial operations more manageable and precise.
• Enhanced Inventory and Purchase Management: With Odoo in place, inventory and purchase management became more efficient, resulting in better control over stock levels and procurement processes for our customer.
• Rapid Subsidiary Integration: The previously implemented and streamlined processes enabled the swift and seamless integration of additional subsidiaries into our customer’s Odoo environment.