Odoo Experience 2023 was held in Brussels, Belgium from 8 to 10 November 2023. In the Keynote - Vision & Strategy talk on day two, Odoo's CEO Fabien Pinckaers presented the company's vision and strategy along with two customer implementations. The Keynote Day 3 talk covered one more implementation, so this post takes them together.
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The market
The new pricing came in last year, and the number of clients per month has since gone up 2.8 times.
Compared with other ERPs, Odoo tends to be weak on branding and on features for particular industries. Odoo puts the money that would go on marketing and advertising into development instead, so on branding and industry features it is not competitive.
To build a brand image without spending money, the choice is to be "different" rather than "better".
Everything, the Odoo website and the white papers included, has been made over into a clean, fresh, colourful and friendly image, while keeping the purple that has always been the concept colour.
Industry platforms have also started to appear.
There are already platforms for hair salons, for non-profits, for law firms and for estate agents, among others, each with Odoo configuration and Knowledge articles prepared for that industry.
By the end of this year the plan is to have 30 to 50 industry platforms.
They tie in with Odoo's app store, so with partners' help their number should keep growing.
An industry platform is a data module; it contains no Python code.
Implementation ①: Médecins sans frontières
Médecins sans frontières has around 11,000 staff, and what they have brought in is mainly Odoo's HR apps.
There were four reasons for choosing Odoo. The first was that Odoo fitted what they needed. The second was that it is user-friendly: with a large number of users and all sorts of people using it, being easy to use mattered. The third was that it is modular, so they could start small and widen it later. The fourth was that it is easy to customise — they needed features specific to the organisation, so being able to customise mattered.
They use Odoo to manage the whole sequence: advertising a vacancy, recruiting, contracts, arranging flights.
Implementation ②: Colona
Colona makes 1,600 kinds of sauce — mayonnaise, ketchup, BBQ sauce and the rest — and has 280 employees.
Colona is a family company in its fourth generation, and when Odoo was proposed there were objections from the family, who had heard about a competitor's troubles with an ERP implementation. The CEO made the case for unifying the systems that had been scattered until then, and pressed ahead with Odoo.
They went into the implementation aiming to develop as little as possible, and 80% of it is used as it comes. There were several features they had developed but did not end up using.
Because Odoo's pricing changed last year, features they had not planned to use became available to them too. When they planned an event, installing the Events app and configuring it was all it took to get going. The mechanics are the same as in the other apps, so the configuration was quickly done, and Recruitment went the same way. They are now looking at PoS, Website and eCommerce. These days, when they want to start something, the first thing they check is the Odoo apps.
Implementation ③: RESQ
This is the implementation presented in the Keynote Day 3 talk on day three.
RESQ is a startup.
Odoo's pricing change last year had a big impact.
A small company has no dedicated IT person and no dedicated HR person; one member of staff carries a great many tasks. When they want to put some part of the business on a system, they install an app from Odoo's app store, configure it, and use it with Odoo's standard flow as it comes. Used that way, upgrading is easy too.
We did have one thing developed, and regretted it immediately afterwards. Rather than developing, we should have changed the process.
Changing people often costs less than changing the software. Where the new process is better than the old one, that is certainly what you should do.
Odoo is like a toolbox. Whatever you want to do, most of the time Odoo has a tool for it. From a large company to a sole trader to a dentist, there is some app worth recommending.
Odoo's podcast channel Planet Odoo carries stories about implementations, which are worth a listen.
Summing up, and what I made of it
Cloud services have become the norm of late. Recruitment has a recruitment system, HR information has an HR information system — each function available on its own, at a fairly accessible price. The bar to deciding on any one of them looks considerably lower than it used to be, even for a small company.
But have you found yourself paying subscription fees to several companies without having a grip on what those fees add up to?
Are your staff opening several browser tabs to reach each cloud service, entering the same information into more than one system?
Do you know how many users each service has, and is anyone making sure that the accounts of people who have left are actually deleted?
Have you ever worked out how much effort goes into registering an account on every cloud service for a new joiner, and training them on every system?
Odoo puts out a new version every year and keeps adding features, and using Odoo brings news of the IT trends with it. As came up in the implementation stories, if you are on Odoo from the start, there is a good chance that starting something new means no more than installing and configuring an Odoo app.
Starting something new takes a fair amount of time in evaluating and choosing a system alone. With Odoo there is a good chance of sparing yourself that effort and that time.
Do give Odoo a try first.
You can get started easily from here.
Odoo Experience 2023 Keynote - Vision & Strategy