The repetitive tasks are perhaps boring for almost everyone. Employees struggle with repetitive tasks, overloaded mailboxes, and administrative jobs that could have been automated. Accessing information and adding data through painful processes can be a real waste of time. Automating business processes can eliminate the redundant and repetitive work of employees. It can streamline the workflow more effectively, and the business operations can be more effective and efficient. Odoo’s family of apps work seamlessly together – giving companies the ability to automate and track everything they do and streamline the business processes effectively and efficiently.
We at Insights Success caught up with Mantavya Gajjar, the Director of Odoo India, to know more about the company. Building for the long term, focusing on users, executing faster, being disruptive, keeping things simple, and investing in people are the principles that drive the decisions of Odoo.
Controlling Entire Business with a Single Dashboard
Fabien Pinckaers founded Odoo in 2005 under the name of TinyERP. As the demand and business grew, the company later changed its name to OpenERP and then to Odoo. Odoo is currently used by five million users worldwide, over 3800+ implementation partners across 200+ countries, and has thousands of members in its online community. The company’s headquarter is a beautiful farm located in Grand Rosière, Belgium. Apart from Belgium, Odoo also has offices in the USA, Luxemburg, Dubai, India, Hongkong, and Mexico.
Odoo’s mission is to provide a range of easy-to-use business applications that form a complete suite of tools to accompany any business need. Odoo gives millions of companies easy access to the software they need to run and expand their business. Here at Odoo, it has developed 30 main applications that are regularly upgraded. Besides, its community of more than 1500 active members has contributed to another 16000+ apps to cover a wide variety of business needs.
The key reason for Odoo’s strong foothold in the ERP market is its advanced features, streamlined integration, and cost-effectiveness. With Odoo, businesses can control their entire business from a single dashboard regardless of their industry.
Increasing Productivity and Revenue
Odoo offers a strong suit of business applications covering all the business needs such as accounting, inventory, manufacturing, project management, HR, CRM, marketing, website, and much more. Each business has its own needs, and Odoo constantly upgrades itself with their unique requirements.
Mantavya mentions that it’s really hard to pick top-notch modules as Odoo tried to accommodate business needs in all its applications. However, Sales, CRM, Inventory, Manufacturing, Odoo studio apps are embraced by almost all businesses.
Odoo regularly publishes customer success stories on its platform, and it lists all the apps that those businesses are using. Odoo suggests giving it a read to better understand how it is solving business problems while increasing their productivity and revenue.
Providing Cost-effective, Smooth and User-friendly Platform
Odoo wanted to build a platform where businesses don’t need to juggle through multiple tools and platforms. All these applications are integrated, which means that any data added in one app is synchronized with the other apps that could need that data. For example, when you sell a product to a customer, you enter the customer details in the CRM app. Then, from the Sales app, you create the invoice. Once it’s done, the accountant who uses the Accounting app sees the invoice directly, and your colleagues working in the warehouse see from the Inventory app that they need to pack the product sold. Streamlined integration means the elimination of lots of redundant and repetitive work.
ERP systems like SAP, NetSuite are costly, and MSEs can’t afford such softwares. Meanwhile, this softwares require extra effort for maintenance. On the other hand, Odoo is a cost-effective, smooth, and user-friendly platform that ensures effective and efficient business operations. From one-person start-ups or SMEs to 1000 employee companies, anyone can use Oddo. Businesses can add apps according to their growth, adding one app at a time as their needs evolve and the customer base grows.
Additionally, a short implementation time gives an upper hand to Odoo when businesses switch from another platform to Odoo. In a nutshell, Odoo’s user-centric approach, user-friendliness together with the complete suite of apps at an affordable price makes Odoo a preferred choice.
Creating Something Unique in the Market
Odoo works on the Open-Source business model. The company built a community from great open-source products, and this model allowed it to stabilize and start growing. By being fully open source at the beginning, it was hard for Odoo to make it work. But at one point, it started getting results as it has a large community.
Odoo has two products, but they are based on the same core, which is the open-source version. Odoo enterprise revenue helps it invest more in the Odoo community, and Open-source users help it develop the brand. The combination of both these things brings innovation, revenue, and a lot of users. This allowed Odoo to create something unique in the market where it can sell software at 8 times lesser than traditional management software.
Today, Odoo has 1700 employees, a forecasted billing of €160M in 2021, a growth rate of 70% of the billing, and it is profitable. With 3850 partners, and 90K community members living from the software, Odoo is a strong ecosystem. It also has the biggest business app store in the world, with 30k apps.
In the future, Odoo will continue solving complex business problems. Looking at its growth, Mantavya believes that it will be one of the major actors on the market.
Mantavya Gajjar, Director, Odoo India
