Leveraging Odoo Apps for Rapid Development and Scale While Utilizing Multiple Legacy Systems

Overview

Utilizing Odoo’s powerful and flexible ERP system to develop a custom operating system for a prestige personal care brand. The client’s heavy reliance on its legacy systems presented a problem once they needed to scale. Though their systems did not allow much flexibility for improvement, Novobi designed a solution that allowed the client keep their legacy systems intact while expanding its capabilities to better serve their end users.

The Client

INDUSTRY:

Personal and Skin Care

LOCATION:

International

A Prestige Personal & Skin Care Brand

This skincare brand is a subsidiary of a €50 billion multinational consumer goods company. It is largely differentiated in its industry by its dedication to educating skin care professionals on product fluency and best practices in skin care. In addition to alignment with the brand’s core mission, their training classes also represent a substantial revenue stream.

Challenge #1

Needed a robust user registration portal with a quick turnaround on solution delivery

Solution

Leverage Odoo’s native applications for rapid deployment with minimal customization

Challenge #2

The new user registration portal must integrate with multiple legacy systems

Solution

Migrate legacy systems to AWS to utilize cloud resources and optimize functionality

“Typically, clients ask us to replace their legacy systems to get more done and to scale, but in this project, the main condition is for us to keep their legacy systems intact. We needed to add more functionalities to their system and improve it to scale easily. It was a challenge, but it’s something that Novobi handled easily.”

 

– Lee Lou | Project Manager, Novobi

The Client’s Challenge

As a brand that has been building its product portfolio and educational offering for over 30 years, many of the technology systems they rely on are dated and difficult to innovate. The complex infrastructural challenges for this client are balanced between cloud architecture and application development for a robust class registration solution.

Rapid Deployment

Need a Robust Registration Portal with a Quick Turnaround on Solution Delivery

The client needed a class registration portal with a progress monitoring and certification tracker to monitor their end users as they progress through an online certification process. The high-level functional requirements, though numerous, were standard; the logic structure connecting these functionalities and the existing legacy systems presented an extra layer of complexity to the project.

Seamless Integration

New Registration Portal Must Connect to Multiple Legacy Systems

The client’s legacy systems were in use independently across 5 global regions. The client’s internal IT team lacked the resources to manage these systems’ migration to the cloud adequately. Since the registration app must integrate seamlessly with the existing systems — as only portions of the stack are modernized — cloud migration became a crucial part of the entire project.

“The Odoo modules did the heavy-lifting when meeting the functionality requirements. We had to focus more on logic and cloud architecture.”

 

– Lee Lou | Project Manager, Novobi

Novobi’s Solution 

Novobi was tasked with expanding the ability of the client’s legacy systems, not replace them. Novobi utilized the fullest extent of Odoo’s native application capabilities to meet the functional requirement of the system and directed a substantial effort to seamlessly integrating the new development with the legacy systems currently in place.

Leverage Odoo Apps Functionalities for Rapid Development

Although some customizations were necessary to enhance Odoo’s out-of-box functionalities for SSO (Single Sign-On), enhanced usability, and seamless data movement, Novobi focused on rapid development rather than reinventing basic technical principles.

Novobi used the Website Module for front-end development, the Event Module for scheduling, and part of the Accounting Module for online payments to build the client’s registration portal.

Built on Odoo’s cloud-based framework, online class registration is centralized, user-friendly, and can be accessed anywhere. Learn more about the online registration features: Building Online Registration for Classes and Certification Management on Odoo.

Migrate Legacy Systems to AWS to Utilize Cloud Resources

Novobi needed to migrate the client’s legacy systems for this complex infrastructure deployment and utilize AWS cloud hosting for the new build. Novobi migrated the systems from Rackspace to AWS as part of the project scope. Novobi also implemented cross-cloud disaster recovery for the highest possible system uptime and redundancy to prevent data loss. With this new set up, the client was able to scale and expand their offerings to more parts of the world with less effort.

The new system set up sends the data captured from Odoo’s front-end to the client’s systems to manage. Odoo then fetches the data from there to display on the website. To not overload the client’s systems, Novobi configured Odoo to process the simple requests received. Novobi also added the capability to quickly build new pages and integrate with the client’s existing systems.

Integrated ETO Process with Traceability

With an improved and integrated ETO workflow, ICS had full traceability of materials across PO, MO, SO, and invoices with automatic updates to inventory and the BOM based on design changes.

Since the ETO process is flexible and adaptive based on the end client’s feedback, ICS needed to update the BOM frequently during a project. With their new ETO workflow, this can be done quickly and easily with a job cost report that captures costing in real time.

“High-level, the requirement is to build the registration portal and use their legacy systems for data management. And we used Odoo and AWS to design an elegant solution for the business.”

 

– Lee Lou | Project Manager, Novobi

The Novobi Approach

Novobi follows a strict implementation schedule following CMMI and Scrum frameworks with weekly sprints, ensuring that clients can expect demos and workable solutions weekly or biweekly. Novobi also follows best practices in configuration and customization to ensure the system functions correctly and protects client’s intellectual property. This approach makes it easier and more cost-effective to upgrade in the future.

Discovery

Planning

Implementation

Launch

Training

Support

Discovery

During discovery, Novobi examined all the existing systems to identify factors that may have presented issues during the integration. After gathering the functional requirements for the class registration portal, Novobi performed a gap analysis to outline the customizations needed.

Planning

With Odoo Apps meeting many functional requirements of the project, much of the planning revolved around cloud architecture, migration, and system logic. Novobi’s PM and Business Analyst worked closely with the client walking them through the development plan.

Implementation

Migration and preparing the legacy systems for integration took much of the development time. Though the customizations required were not as time-consuming, a considerable amount of effort was still put into ensuring that the new registration portal met the client’s expectations.

Launch

Since the registration portal comprises two different systems, the project had two go-live dates, with the first one five months from development start and the second go-live two months later. Both deployments were successful with no significant issues, and the portal was ready to accommodate online registrations from launch.

Training

Novobi provided training for the client’s business representatives who were tasked with assisting portal users. This training was to ensure that the users were confident in the new system and ready to assist their end users with the registration process as needed.

Support

Novobi has provided ongoing maintenance to the system to ensure 99.9% uptime with minimal timeouts or disruption of service across the client’s global locations. Novobi also provided support and assistance to the client for any upgrades that the system may have needed to scale as their business continues to grow.

Novobi's Methodology & Certifications

The Results  

Keeping legacy systems in place while expanding their functionalities to accommodate their end users’ needs would typically require far more time and cost than spent. But by combining existing Odoo software with cloud-based technology and data analytics, Novobi created an innovative, efficient, and scalable solution that saved the client time and money on development and maintenance.

Saved Time and Budget

With rapid development from Odoo Apps

With Odoo’s native apps, Novobi delivered a feature-rich system in nearly half the time. Novobi took about six months to finish the project, typically taking about eight months to a year if built from scratch.

 

Seamless Ability to Scale

Without needing to replace legacy systems

Novobi’s cloud architecture combined with Odoo’s platform flexibility for customization allowed the client to scale without having to replace its largely dated legacy systems.

Want to Learn More?

Learn more about Novobi’s custom accounting application and how they adapted financial management tools for the US-market. Sign up below:

 

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