Home > Case studies > Joolca

Joolca case study

WilldooIT took the time to understand our business and the end result is a true multi-company, multi-location setup all under one instance in Odoo. WilldooIT’s expertise helped to ensure we built the system with future expansion in mind.

Jacek Slodyczka • Director & Head of Operations, Joolca
About Joolca:

Founded in 2011, Joolca is a family-owned Australian engineering and design company. They specialise in creating home comforts for outdoor use. Our design studio and head offices are in Melbourne, and we’ve got distribution and staff right around the world.


The challenge:

Some of the pain points Joolca faced include:

  • Separate instances of Xero/Neto required for each region. 
  • Neto was only available in AU/NZ. For USA, we had to use Shopify as our ‘backend’ which it isn’t designed to do.
  • Multiple separate and disjointed systems which didn’t communicate together.
  • Relying on Excel/Google sheets to bridge any information gaps and often times making compromises in one software so that it wouldn’t break another. 
  • Compiling information/reporting across multiple regions was cumbersome.
  • It was very clear the systems we had in place were not going to scale with our plans for growth.

The solution:

Lots of discovery happening during the early phone calls. The end result was a multi company, multi location setup for each of our entities, under the one Odoo instance. 

Additionally we implemented the following modules:

  • Sales
  • Purchase
  • Inventory
  • Accounting
  • Consolidation
  • Shopify

In addition, there was significant custom development work covering:

  • Modifying the Shopify module to our needs.
  • Building out 3PL connections to each our various 3PL partners. The solution put in place easily allows us to add new 3PL partners in different regions, as well as allows us to add multiple 3PL warehouses within each region.
  • Cron Jobs to help automate certain aspects of day to day workflows.


Why choose Odoo as your business management/ERP solution?

During our investigation phase, we explored Odoo, Netsuite (also JCurve) and Microsoft Dynamics 365. The investigation involved also speaking with other companies using the software above.

All other ERP options available were cost prohibitive from an implementation and yearly cost point of view. 

Odoo seemed to have the required capabilities for a fraction of the cost. If anything was lacking, it seemed possible to customise it to our needs. 

Once we decided on Odoo, we explored multiple integration partners across USA, Europe and Australia. 


The result & benefits

Since implementing Odoo, we have full visibility across all data across all regions. It is extremely powerful to have one centralised location for all our data – sales, inventory, accounting. 

Working largely out of one platform has improved efficiencies for most roles. 

We can review everything right from the Group Level, all the way down to individual SKUs at a regional level. 

Recording all changes as they are made, as well as ability to leave internal comments in the chatter has been great to help identify any issues with workflows and continuous improvement. 

The largest benefit to Joolca wasn’t moving to a cloud-based system, rather it was moving to a centralised cloud-based system.


Why WilldooIT?

3 reasons:

  • WilldooIT is an Odoo Gold Partner and 3x APAC partner of the year.
  • It is a local Australian company. Working with a US/EU firm is possible, but the time-zone differences do make things more difficult.
  • Previous history working on large/complex implementations. 


What was your experience of working with the team at WilldooIT?  

WilldooIT know their software back to front, the client knows their business back to front – it needs to be a collaborative approach to get the best results. 

They listen to ideas and provide different options on how to achieve the desired outcomes. Having a local team which I can get in touch quickly (both email and phone) has been a key factor in our success. 

We were also able to leverage knowledge from senior developers as well as accounting subject matter experts to help work through any complex issues we came across. 


– Jacek Slodyczka • Director & Head of Operations, Joolca