Woods Furniture Case Study

About Woods   

Challenges they faced

At Woods, we believe that education is of the utmost importance – not just for the children of today but for our world tomorrow. This belief has driven our team, for over half a century, to study how children learn – from a behavioural, ergonomic and cognitive perspective – to develop furniture that is flexible, adaptable and stimulating.

It’s this philosophy that inspires our intelligently designed range of furniture from desks to seating, soft furnishings to storage for both students and teachers alike. At Woods, we’re for flexible learning.

  • Replacing a  20-year-old system plus multiple spreadsheets and integrating our existing and partly automated manufacturing software and manual systems

  • No vertical software packages exactly fitted their requirements, or if they did they were standalone and needed further work to integrate into yet another new package

  • Finding a system that could grow with Woods and had the capability to cover the requirements of the entire organisation

  • Involving staff in the design of the new system

Solutions

  • Custom development by WilldooIT to implement their complex order requirements. A product configurator was implemented with the flexibility to handle the many options available when ordering products

  • Two-way integration to existing manufacturing system allowed Woods to stage system implementation

  • Utilisation of Odoo’s integrated email facilities to keep customers informed

  • Custom development by WilldooIT to manage product transport to site potentially through several intermediate warehouses

  • Implemented standard Odoo finances

Success

  • Our products have so many variations that prior to Odoo only one or two staff could reliably enter orders. Now even our salespeople in the middle of Queensland can easily create and confirm quotations.

  • Salespeople now have access to all their customer quotations from anywhere in Australia.

  • Invoices are now shipped with the goods which has decreased the average age of unpaid invoices.

  • Another complex part of our operations was transport to all parts of Australia - this is now managed by Odoo with integration hooks to our existing manufacturing system.

  • Better and more timely management reporting.

  • Customer communication improved through automated emails.

  • Strong platform for future growth.

  • Custom developments by WilldooIT leveraged Odoo existing features to give a near 100% software fit in critical area of the business.