“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.".
The Company
A family-owned engineering company, bringing indoor comforts outdoors.
Joolca is a family business, run by four brothers. Initially started by Maciek, he paid for his university studies by refurbishing old gas heaters and hot water systems. Being an avid camper he decided to create something that himself and other fellow campers would use. The result was HOTTAP, the world’s smallest water heater of it’s type.
Today they are a full-service product engineering and design company serving customers across Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK and most recently Canada.
At Joolca, they imagine a world where exploring the great outdoors is comfortable, achievable and enjoyable for everyone.
Starting with everything water, they are perfecting one product category at a time: running water, power, heating, cooling, you name it.
The challenge
What systems did you use previously?
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Neto, Xero, Excel, Shopify
What were the issues, challenges or pain points you had when starting to consider a new ERP system?
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Some of the main pain points:
- 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 systems which didn’t communicate together
- 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
Why did Joolca decide to choose Odoo? Did you consider other options?
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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.
Why did you engage WilldooIT to assist with the Odoo implementation?
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Once we decided on Odoo, we explored multiple integration partners across USA, Europe and Australia.
Reasons why we chose WilldooIT:
- Previous history working on large/complex implementations
- Local company. Working with a US / EU firm is possible, but the time-zone differences do make things more difficult
- Odoo Gold Partner & 3x APAC partner of the year
How did WilldooIT approach the solution to address your needs?
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Lots of discovery happening during the early phone calls. One thing that made it easier to compare quality of each potential implementation partner was sharing our requirements/feature list for comment.
I believe sharing this document helped direct discovery to the most important topics relating to our business.
What was our solution? What apps did we implement/develop/modify and why?
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:
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Sales
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Purchase
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Inventory
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Accounting
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Consolidation
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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
How has having a cloud-based system benefitted your business?
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From inception, Joolca has always been cloud-based focused. Our issue in the past was one of disjointed systems, not communicating together. This resulted in inefficiencies, 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 software.
Since implementing Odoo, we have full visibility across all data, across all regions. It’s extremely powerful to have one centralised location for all our data; sales, inventory, accounting. We can review everything right from the Group Level, all the way down to individual SKUs at a regional level.
The largest benefit to Joolca wasn’t moving to a cloud-based system, rather it was moving to a centralised cloud-based system.
The Result
Did Odoo and the WilldooIT solution solve your challenges and assist in accomplishing your objectives?
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Yes. The team has always been responsive and helping to drive results. I found that it’s generally best to make sure the client is actively helping to drive the project instead of taking a passive approach. WilldooIT knows 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.
What benefits did you see because of our work? (Increased efficiency, reduced errors, etc.)
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Full data visibility across all regions for sales, inventory, accounting. Working largely out of one platform has improved efficiencies for most roles. Lastly, 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.
What was your experience of working with the team at WilldooIT?
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The team is very knowledgeable and responsive. They listen to ideas and provide different options 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.