![[Odoo case study] Asterisk Inc. (mobile solutions)](/web/image/blog.post/58/author_avatar/%5BOdoo%20case%20study%5D%20Asterisk%20Inc.%20%28mobile%20solutions%29?unique=0fc5327)
Kuroki-san of Asterisk Inc., a company spreading smiles through IT, sent us their experience of adopting Odoo.
Scope: Sales, Purchase, Inventory, Invoicing (receivables and payables)
Version: 12.0 Community
Users: around 50 (cumulative)
Sites: United States (Oregon), China (Dalian), the Netherlands
Project period: December 2018 to February 2019
What made the project distinctive: Odoo was rolled out to three overseas sites in a short three months, using the standard functionality almost as it comes
Services used: Odoo agile implementation, Odoo cloud hosting, Odoo application maintenance, Odoo on-demand support
Tell us about your company
We are a hardware manufacturer that can also build systems. We make and sell readers with our own automatic identification technology — barcode and RFID — that attach to an iPhone or iPad touch. Our roots are in software, so we can also develop and supply software to match the hardware, tailored to each user.
What led you to choose Odoo?
We have sales bases in the United States and Europe and two development bases in China, and as the business grew quickly we urgently needed a system that would show the state of each site in real time. Odoo, an open source ERP, caught our eye, so we first installed it in-house and evaluated what it could do. We found it had most of what we were looking for, but we had concerns about configuration, developing extra features, and running and maintaining it — so we approached the specialists at Quartile.
What changed after you adopted Odoo?
The big benefit is having information from the overseas subsidiaries gathered into one system. Standardising on a single platform has kept management costs down and let us push on with standardising operations, and the state of orders, shipments, receipts and invoicing — which we previously had to check with each site individually — is now visible from Japan in real time. The communication history attached to each transaction is kept as well, and it is easy to pull out material that explains the basis of an accounting figure, so audits move faster too.
How have you found Quartile's service?
We are satisfied with it. At the US site, for example, we have to manage third-party certificates against individual transactions; they understood that country-specific requirement, implemented the customisation for it, and improved things for the users at the same time.
When we say "we would like a feature that does this", the answer covers existing modules as well as customisation, so we get what we want at low cost — which is a real help. We also appreciate that the advice is comprehensive as a consultant's should be, taking in how the team works rather than only the system.
What would you like to see improved?
One of Odoo's strengths is firm phase management across the commercial flow: for any single transaction you can see in detail what happened and when. If anything, we would like a little more visibility of the thread running from order through shipment to invoicing and payment.
From Tashiro, the consultant on the project
Unifying the core systems of three overseas sites on Odoo, led from the Japanese head office, made for a project that was relatively demanding on the communication side. But Fukuda-san and Kuroki-san from the systems team, and the other key members, kept a firm grip on the essentials and carried the work through, so we were able to go live in a short three months. Rolling out across several sites with different languages, currencies and business customs is exactly where Odoo's multi-currency and multi-language support, and its wide track record around the world, come into their own.
As Kuroki-san says, the real significance was in standardising how each site operates and reaching a state where Japan and each site can talk while looking at the same data.
[Odoo case study] Asterisk Inc. (mobile solutions)