White Paper

Improve Your Demand Forecasting Using Sales Data to Drive Production

edward.mcdonald — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 07:21:19 +0000

Improve Your Demand Forecasting Using Sales Data to Drive Production edward.mcdonald Mon, 03/22/2021 - 00:21

Optimize inventory, meet customer demand, and increase profits with a holistic approach built on open source ERP.

Introduction

Every year, manufacturers of all sizes lose millions due to out-of-stock products and overstocked inventory. This causes missed customer commitments as well as diminished margins. With accurate forecasting, based on integrated sales and product data, companies can effectively plan and predict future demand, optimize inventory levels, and nimbly respond to market disruptions and volatility.

Companies that take a holistic approach to planning, combined with integrating disconnected systems with an open source ERP, can use accurate data to identify the right opportunities for improvement and take the guesswork out of predicting demand. They can create visibility into the value stream—mapping out every step of the process from the customer to production, assembly, packaging, and shipping. They can find their pacesetter to pinpoint needed inventory, the impacts on the supply chain, as well as where and how to boost time and obtain resources to meet demand spikes.

Ultimately, integrated planning allows manufacturers to know their customers at a deeper level. They can produce the right product at the right time to meet customer commitments, eliminating waste, reducing costs, improving on-time-delivery, and increasing profits. They can also increase visibility into the health of the organization to grow and maintain a competitive advantage even during turbulent times.

The challenge of optimizing inventory

Whether you work in food and beverage, apparel, appliances, computer, electrical, or any other manufacturing sector, the never-ending dilemma is: how do you maintain the right amount of inventory and production, meet customer commitments, and make money?

That’s because most manufacturers struggle with excess, lost, and damaged inventory, especially when there have been disruptions to the supply chain and unpredictable peaks and valleys in consumer shopping. But the core challenges preclude current events; for instance, companies often struggle during the holiday season when orders spike dramatically; or, if you’re a B2B manufacturer, when orders increase at the end of the fiscal year.

With the volatility of inventory comes the issue of service quality and customer experience. Businesses that struggle to meet customer demands and deliver on-time will turn off a modern-day customer, because they lack the brand loyalty of buyers from just a few years ago.

An estimated 89% of consumers have switched to doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. Moreover, if a customer is not satisfied, 13% will tell 15 or more people that they are unhappy. Today’s customers want products fast, and their shopping preferences can change quickly and dramatically, making it challenging to ensure you have the right amount of manufactured goods to meet customer expectations.

This is where forecasting comes into play. The challenge for most companies with their demand planning involves how they analyze historical sales and transaction data and whether they operate using siloed technology, people, and processes. Many companies look at sales data in one system to predict their future demand without ever sharing or consulting product information to estimate inventory replenishment and ordering activities.

Holistic forecasting begins with the customer

To meet customer demand, you’ll want to use a forecasting cycle. And you’ll want to take a holistic approach that includes an accurate sales forecast and supply chain strategy, including how much inventory you need and what the supply chain can do to provide that. This will consist of inventory types. With your sales, supply chain, and inventory data integrated, you’ll have the complete picture it takes to produce a successful production plan.

You’ll want to keep each element of the plan aligned, focused, and simple to drive towards better production. Start by looking at historical sales data to identify highs and lows in your selling cycle by quarter, month, or any other appropriate time period. For instance, you could designate by the holiday season or summer months. In an open source ERP, that data can be located in your CRM, which is integrated with accounting, inventory, purchasing, manufacturing, and more. As part of building your forecast, consider additional variables such as marketing campaigns, new product developments, and other impacts on your future state.

Once you identify the sales spikes and dips, you can begin to level-load demand to bolster against disruptions to the market. You’ll want to take that sales intelligence and apply it to your production plan. And one way to do that efficiently involves a visual tool known as a value stream map.

Create visibility into your value stream

An important principle to embrace is value-stream mapping, which stems from lean management. Mapping your value stream provides a visual means to view the steps in a specific process so you can easily quantify time and volume. It helps organizations understand the flow of materials as they progress through the process.

You can start with a simple pen and paper. Begin with your customer because they drive the production and resources needed to meet demand. Then draw out the current state, including elements from sourcing to production, assembly, and packaging. You can also attribute the staffing, resources, and time involved in each step. Your sales team will give you an average of what they’ll need to meet predicted customer commitments.

This will give your Takt time, which is the rate (month, week, and day) at which you need to complete a product to meet customer demand in the normal buy cycle. Once you have the proper product Takt time, you will look at the supply chain and your suppliers to understand what you’ll need from them to meet your Takt time and customer commitments. This will drive providing accurate forecasts of what you’ll need in a timely manner. Again, having your sales, warehouse, inventory, supplier, and other data in an integrated, open solution equates to greater transparency and accessibility for both internal and external stakeholders.

Know your pacemaker

As part of your value stream map, you’ll want to identify your pacemaker, which is the single point where the entire production process is scheduled. You want to identify the operation that takes the most time and therefore produces the least amount in the same time frame.

For example, you might be an equipment manufacturer who, on any given day, can build 10 components, assemble 20 products, and package 30 products a day. This means that in 24 hours, the most amount of completed products you can ship is 10 because you can only build 10 components.

You can then go back to your Takt time (the number of products you need to produce to meet customer demand) to ensure you’re not at risk of missing future demand. For instance, if you have a forecasted Takt time of 15 sales a day, then the number of components you can build in a day becomes a potential area of risk you will want to address. Now you have the intelligence needed to drive meaningful business decisions into ways to increase building capacity, whether it involves adding additional resources, such as adding another production line, or more dedicated staffing hours in a 24-hour period.

Identifying your pacesetter ultimately helps remove complexity. How? If you try to capacity plan every element and step of production and labor, you’ll create waste because you’ll increase the wrong steps in your value stream. Your pacesetter identifies where to adjust using the right information stored in your enterprise ERP.

Drive improvements back up the value stream

As you map your value chain and understand your inventory demand, you can go back to view anticipated seasonal spikes. Perhaps in December, you have two operations at risk—building and assembly. That can create a warehouse problem because you might have to store a dramatic increase in outsourced materials for just a short duration. And increasing the number of materials you keep in the warehouse raises the risk of damaged or lost items and impacts cost.

Through the holistic process of creating a value stream map, you identify what and when materials and inventory are needed by quarter, month, week, and day. You can anticipate what an increase in the supply chain means for warehouse space and resource planning. You can also make better business decisions, such as when to carry increased inventory and how to react when suppliers face disruptions, like COVID-19, so you can adjust using real data to keep their inventory levels correct. By doing so, you’ll improve your overall inventory management, which drives efficiencies upstream in your supply chain.

In addition, when you know your product data and your demand on a daily or weekly basis, you can give your suppliers more accurate information ahead of time, which ties back to the value of your forecasting and helps create better vendors in the supply chain. If your suppliers know what they need to produce in advance, they make better decisions, such as when to build a bulk shipment based on a push model.

Master your demand forecasting

With complete data and transparency, tackling sales and product forecasting becomes a lot easier. It’s just a matter of taking a holistic approach and breaking down silos using technology. And while there are many ways to improve forecasting, one proven method involves evaluating and mapping the organization’s current state, getting the right information into the system, and improving methods moving forward to impact the future state.

Odoo EDI Integration

edward.mcdonald — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 07:29:00 +0000

Odoo EDI Integration edward.mcdonald Mon, 10/09/2017 - 00:29

White Paper

Data Integration

At Open Source Integrators (OSI), we have implemented a lot of Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) systems between Odoo based manufacturers and wholesalers and various distributors and retail channels. EDI’s promise of streamlining business transactions is real, to the point where some retailers require EDI in order to sell to them.

odoo-edi-integration.pdf

Challenges

EDI “Standards” tend to be more of a starting point, and many flavors of a “standard” document exist.
There is often little documentation as to proper implementation, and generally poor error handling and messaging.
Besides the technical challenges, there are business process challenges. If a system is to send or receive EDI messages, it needs to know what business functions are triggered, and what do to. For example, if we are offering a “Make to Order” product for sale via EDI, the receipt of a PO (850 document) should trigger a manufacturing order, a check of the current raw materials inventory, scheduling of manufacturing resources, and ordering of any needed materials not in stock.
Many EDI implementers do not understand the upstream effects on supply chain. Companies may not have the tools to plan orders or manufacturing correctly, in order to meet their commitments, or alternatively, may order too much, ending up with gluts of inventory or wasted labor or space.

Get the Most Out of an EDI Integration

Your ERP system must be tuned to seamlessly be able to fulfil the orders for your products, reducing labor and waste, and maximizing throughput. All the systems must be working harmoniously, creating a workflow that delivers your product at the highest efficiency.

This is where experience come into play—OSI’s approach is to take a holistic view of the process. While it is important to sort through the technical details of establishing a reliable EDI connection, it is also important to ensure that the manufacturing, purchasing and fulfilment business processes are implemented correctly, in order to maximize the gains of the system.

Given these challenges, OSI can suggest two basic EDI implementation patterns. Let’s examine both of these.

Direct EDI Integration Option

In this option, we will want to create a direct connection between the vendor and the retailer. This is common in many cases, and may be the appropriate choice if one of the parties is unwilling to work with an EDI “middleman” or VAN.

We will automate document flow from a big retailer (“Customer”) to our Odoo using company (“Company”) and vice versa.

The Customer sends a purchase orders in EDI to the Company.
The Company has set up a listening server that offers Applicability Standard 2 (AS2) services to capture the purchase orders from the Customer.
The Company will then convert the EDI into a format that can be ported into Odoo as a Sales Order.
A sales acknowledgment and invoice will be compiled and transferred back from Odoo in the EDI format for transmission back to the Customer.

The complexity of this procedure centers around setting up the AS2 server and converting EDI into Odoo documents.

The sample workflow from our customer to Odoo and back looks like this:

After these technical matters are completed, we get to the issues of ensuring that your Odoo system is configured to manage the production, fulfillment and accounting of this process.

SPS Commerce EDI Integration

In our example of the previous option, each vendor EDI relationship is customized. The fields for the EDI messages are often quite specific to a particular vendor or customer. This may mean that the EDI connection cannot be easily duplicated for other customer/vendor relationships, and increased maintenance of the existing connections.

Wouldn’t it be nice to work with an organization that would allow your company to take a more general approach to your EDI connection, and they will work out the hard bits of translation, field matching and scheduling? What if they could even give you real time sales analytics back as a benefit?

Open Source Integrators is pleased to provide an approach to Odoo EDI challenges that is simultaneously simpler, and more powerful. Through our strategic relationship with SPS Commerce, OSI can offer EDI integration with the largest retail network in the world.

OSI’s SPS Commerce connector allow companies to use one link (between Odoo and SPS Commerce) that now joins them to 60,000 potential trading partners (retailers, wholesalers and brokers) for order management.

Additionally, through SPS Commerce’s channels, we can request Near Real Time sales numbers back from a number of end vendors, (through an EDI form 852), giving us inventory, sales by SKU, etc., at the individual store level. This gives companies visibility into sell through, stock outs, and overstock situations, as aggregated or granular as one wishes. It is now possible to get Near Real Time measurements of sales by geography, seasonality and allocation/inventory rules, as well as the ability to offer replenishment on call.

This feedback loop profoundly changes the relationship between Suppliers and Retailers.

OSI Solves EDI

Order management is at the heart of your business, and Open Source Integrators can deliver the complete solution for this critical business function.

You and your business can comply with EDI partner requirement in an easier manner than ever before, better predict sales and inventory needs, and ultimately, build the efficient product business you are envisioning.

OSI’s experience and tools deliver the Best in Class implementation that can fundamentally change your approach to order management and sales channels fulfillment and feedback.

Big Data Integration with Odoo

edward.mcdonald — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 05:40:41 +0000

Big Data Integration with Odoo edward.mcdonald Thu, 09/28/2017 - 22:40

White Paper

Odoo Solutions

Data Integration

The power of real-time data is unleashed with Odoo ERP. USA Odoo’s open source ERP data management capabilities, when seamlessly integrated, drive and connect enterprise resources with best-of-class analysis platforms.

big-data-integration-white-paper.pdf

Data Integration Architecture

The USA Odoo community has devised a number of tools that manage Data Integration. Odoo provides an open API, and shares freely through a number of standard web service protocols. Click here for advanced details.

For the purposes of this white paper, we will offer several options. To determine the best approach, we would need to understand more about the “Data Lake” and if there is a proposed enterprise solution, such as Hadoop or an Enterprise Services Bus in the works.

Hortonworks Hadoop Data Lake

In this case, we are relying the Hadoop ecosystem to do the heavy lifting, and provide tools that will talk to USA Odoo’s underlying PostgreSQL database. The Hadoop tool for this is Sqoop, and it uses a JDBC connection to make the connection with USA Odoo.

Any needed Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) activities would be done in Hadoop, using PIG scripting and processing. Hadoop (and the extended ecosystem) are made for this data storage, ETL and integration.

The Hadoop approach may meet the needs that are diagrammed in the “DATA REPOSITORIES” diagram above.

On the USA Odoo side, we would use the USA Odoo module “Import_ODBC” to manage record and object changes. This will ensure that USA Odoo captures “Row/field” level changes, but by going through this module, we can ensure integrity. USA Odoo’s database should not be modified directly, as it may cause corruption problems.

Odoo Data Integration Modules

In this case, we are assuming little about the “Data Lake” and its ETL capabilities. We can do the data integration in USA Odoo with modules that map incoming data to the object models. We can map “like” or “unlike” schemas, using Python and submapping.

These tools are part of USA Odoo’s ecosystem, and work exceptionally well. They have provided the foundation of mapping to a number of external systems, such as E-Commerce, Content Management, Enterprise Service Buses, and similar systems.

By using this approach, we are assured of all data being transformed and validated by USA Odoo itself, ensuring schema cleanliness and row/field level changes.

This approach will work well bi-directionally with data warehousing technologies or other systems. However, maintaining multiple point-to-point integrations can be time consuming.

Kettle, Talend or ESB

In this case, we are considering using a “middleware” approach to data integration. Pentaho Kettle, Mule or Zato ESBs, and Talend are all examples of solutions.

When acquiring other companies, and integrating their systems quickly, this approach has some key advantages. It would allow the absorption of other systems rapidly, keeping newly acquired child companies intact, and operating, but not conflicting with the overall Enterprise architecture.

With all middleware approaches, we must consider the nuances of messaging, validation, and acknowledgement issues. They all offer high performance and lower long-term maintenance costs.

The tradeoff is that implementations are challenging and expensive.

For ESB’s, we would use the web service APIs previously referenced, and therefore, USA Odoo would see updates and changes natively and act appropriately.

For “online ETL” technologies, we would build the validation rules to ensure clean data updates to USA Odoo, and again, validate changes natively, rather than allowing direct writing to the database.

This approach will work well bi-directionally with data warehousing technologies or other systems. The initial cost and effort are higher for all systems, but long-term maintenance is lower.

Open Source Integrators has experience with large ESB integrations for a Utility company, where reliability and safety were key, as well as Talend and Kettle ETL migrations of large USA Odoo data sets.

Services Architecture

USA Odoo has delivered a services architecture (XML-RPC and JSON-RPC) from the beginning. This approach has allowed it to support multiple clients (desktop, mobile, and thin), and a variety of integrations with external services.

The most popular services approach is to use XML-RPC. Please see the documentation here for examples of using this with Python, Ruby, PHP and Java.

By using this approach, developers are accessing USA Odoo the same way as the Client Tier within the Application Server.

This means that external system or program will be considered another client, and therefore, this connection will be managed in a way that goes with the grain of the software. All functionality and business logic will exist through this API.

Given the variety of preferences in the community, add-on modules exist that extend USA Odoo for REST type architectures. These tools are less utilized, given the power and functionality of the XML-RPC approach.

Finally, USA Odoo is using a structured, extendable schema in PostgreSQL. Clients do not access PostgreSQL directly, and will utilize the XML-RPC components for any “CRUD” type actions. This will maintain integrity and durability of the USA Odoo system.

Conclusion

The Power of Data Integration and Odoo

It’s all about connecting your people by bringing disparate systems and data together. Best practice open source data integrations will empower your executives to simplify and increase confidence in their decisions. Open Source Integrators will arm your teams to make better, quicker and more accurate decisions to increase the efficiency of the organization and the satisfaction of your stakeholders.

Odoo solutions for Member Organizations

edward.mcdonald — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 05:56:51 +0000

Odoo solutions for Member Organizations edward.mcdonald Tue, 09/26/2017 - 22:56

White Paper

Odoo Solutions

eCommerce

E-commerce systems usually have a large limitation; they are stand alone, and don’t manage configurable, manufactured products, or on demand services very well. If you expect your e-commerce system to create configured products or services, on demand, and manage inventory, raw materials, and manufacturing, you have not had many choices…until now.

Open-ERP-Solutions-for-Member-Organizations.pdf

Membership Management

Members would be considered “Partners” in USA Odoo. The requirements to manage member enrollment and renewal, event registration, and payments exists in USA Odoo out of the box, and requires configuration.

Local and National rankings would be a custom report, based on capturing event data in the customer record.

Documents such as liability releases would be stored and managed in Alfresco, and visible in USA Odoo.

Without knowing how Members are currently modeled in the ski association system, a concern would be migration of Member records.

Memberships would be created and managed as Products in USA Odoo and published to the website:

Group or family memberships would be “bundled” products, and allow discounts or other considerations. Variable or promotional pricing is straightforward, using USA Odoo’s implementation of Pricelists.

Duplicate memberships are possible, as there may be two members named “John Smith” (perhaps father and son) at the same address. But, this can be managed by asking the user for confirmation of this duplication.

Once a Member is created, USA Odoo would track all historical data related to their membership. Members would not be deleted, but moved to an inactive status, where they can be monitored and allowed to reactivate.

Offline Member data has some unique considerations—conflicts must be considered upon system synchronization, but we are considering “last change wins” as the default operation. All changes can be tracked and audited, allowing corrections to be made later.

Event Invitations

These would be custom reports, published on or off the website. Further conversations need to be had with the ski association staff to create useful graphics and visualizations for official and public use.

These custom reports would be automated, using a scheduler component. The categories described in the RFI seem straightforward and manageable.

Offline Member Management and Tabulation

We would use USA Odoo’s Point of Sale (POS) system as the basis of requirement. USA Odoo POS works in a disconnected or connected manner, and synchronizes transactions between the individual POS systems and the master USA Odoo system.

Let’s walk through how this might work. At a remote lodge, without Internet access, a worker with an USA Odoo POS system is selling memberships to the ski association. They would be using a laptop with USA Odoo POS installed. Sara Smith, a visitor to the lodge, wants to buy a membership.

It turns out that Sara is already in the system.

But, she needs to update her phone number and address.

We can do this easily and complete the transaction. When the worker reconnects the laptop to the Internet, the systems will be resynchronized, and Sara’s record will be updated.

Event management

USA Odoo offers an Event Management system that is complete and highly functional. Open Source Integrators has experience with this and more complicated Event Management circumstances.

Organizers create events in a simple manner that are then published to the CMS in one step, allowing members to quickly register and pay for their events.

A unique consideration is the requirement of tracking event tabulation and scoring by event. These custom reports would be created by event, but tracked in an aggregated manner to enable the event invitations needed for the national completion.

Further conversations need to be had with ski association staff to create useful graphics and visualizations for official and public use.

Conclusion

USA Odoo E-commerce is designed for:

Complex products
Configured products
Customer’s needs fulfilment

Finally, Odoo e-commerce with exactly what you want.

Odoo with the right integrator helps to deliver exactly what your customers want, quickly and efficiently. Improve your time to market with Odoo capabilities that extend your e-commerce platform.

Create seamless e-commerce and custom integrations into sales, administration, operations, and fulfillment, while ensuring customer satisfaction and profitability time after time. Open Source Integrators designs your technology platforms to support a higher degree of customized products and simplicity when manufacturing with real-time or disparate suppliers.

USA Odoo Manufacturing is designed for:

BOMs on the fly
Reserving stock
Tracking usage/costs
Driving efficiency/productivity

For advanced manufacturing, USA Odoo manufacturing offers accurate inventory valuations for each step, deep product traceability (multi-level serialization), managed contract and outsourced manufacturing, insightful planning and forecasting, and make-to-order highly customizable products.

This is the new benchmark: Manufacturing at the demand and speed of the customer.

USA Odoo Accounting is designed for:

Tracking costs/revenue
Managing inventory valuations
Creating insight

Odoo connects accounting upstream and down.

The accounting integration from USA Odoo empowers real-time accounting valuations and deeper reporting on costs and revenues for both upstream and downstream operations.

Integrate your accounting systems into an interconnected nerve system to increase reliability of your numbers, efficiency of your operations, and quality of your output. OSI will help you create one true picture of your entire business operation. With the right accounting-centric Odoo software capability, the challenge of defining your key demographics will become simple.

Problem Solved: Odoo Solutions Optimize E-commerce for Make-to-Order

edward.mcdonald — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 05:53:59 +0000

Problem Solved: Odoo Solutions Optimize E-commerce for Make-to-Order edward.mcdonald Tue, 09/26/2017 - 22:53

White Paper

Odoo Solutions

eCommerce

Streamline make-to-order manufacturing and optimize your business process management with USA Odoo from Open Source Integrators. The power of Odoo open source ERP e-commerce is unleashed with customized solutions designed to optimize your processes and strengthen your competitive advantage.

Problem-Solved-Open-ERP.pdf

Product Configurators

Make-to-order is a more challenging problem, but a more rewarding practice of manufacturing. It allows consumers to purchase products that are customized to their specifications. Make-to-order relieves the problems of excessive inventory that is common with the traditional make-to-stock manufacturing.

USA Odoo, a subdivision of Open Source Integrators, is reliable, easy to use, and easier to implement than the competition.

USA Odoo’s e-commerce system creates a seamless enterprise manufacturing system, where users can order sophisticated, configurable products online, and USA Odoo will accurately manufacture and deliver these products.

The Process

Choose the product in the shop
Configure the options
Enter the customer information
Enter delivery and payment information
Confirm the order paid with a wire transfer
Manufacture the product
Ship the product
Generate and validate the invoice
Register the payment

USA Odoo is built to source, manufacture, and integrate. No other competing system can do what USA Odoo can do out of the box, including Netsuite or SAP BI.

Finally, Odoo E-commerce with Exactly What You Want

With Odoo e-commerce, OSI’s team of experts not only is dedicated to aligning with your goals but also creating alignment between operations and customer experiences.

Conclusion

USA Odoo E-commerce is designed for:

Complex products
Configured products
Customer’s needs fulfillment

Finally, Odoo e-commerce with exactly what you want.

Odoo with the right integrator helps to deliver exactly what your customers want, quickly and efficiently. Improve your time to market with Odoo capabilities that extend your e-commerce platform.

USA Odoo Manufacturing is designed for:
For advanced manufacturing, USA Odoo manufacturing offers accurate inventory valuations for each step, deep product traceability (multi-level serialization), managed contract and outsourced manufacturing, insightful planning and forecasting, and make-to-order highly customizable products.

BOMs on the fly
Reserving stock
Tracking usage/costs
Driving efficiency/productivity

This is the new benchmark: Manufacturing at the demand and speed of the customer.

USA Odoo Accounting is designed for:
Odoo connects accounting upstream and down.

Tracking costs/revenue
Managing inventory valuations
Creating insight

The accounting integration from USA Odoo empowers real-time accounting valuations and deeper reporting on costs and revenues for both upstream and downstream operations.

Security and CRM optimized with Odoo

edward.mcdonald — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 04:59:32 +0000

Security and CRM optimized with Odoo edward.mcdonald Tue, 09/26/2017 - 21:59

White Paper

Odoo Solutions

CRM

Exceed customer expectations with Odoo to build relationships and a stronger brand. With Odoo-driven CRM best practices, your company will experience heightened security that enhances stakeholder and customer satisfaction, time after time.

Security-and-CRM-Optimized-with-Open-ERP.pdf

Security Policy & Standards

USA Odoo is open source, so the whole codebase is continuously under examination by USA Odoo users and contributors worldwide. There are three approaches we use to audit our code continuously:

Community bug reports are one important source of feedback regarding security. We encourage developers to audit the code and report security issues.

The USA Odoo R&D continuous integration system has code review steps that include a security check for all new and contributed pieces of code.

Many customers have conducted independent code audits and performed penetration tests, and all the findings have been taken into consideration.

USA Odoo is designed in a way that prevents the most common types of security issues:

SQL injections are prevented by the use of a higher-level API that does not require manual SQL queries.

XSS attacks are prevented by the use of a high-level templating system that automatically escapes all data being rendered.

The framework prevents RPC access to private methods, making it harder to introduce exploitable vulnerabilities.

The safety of USA Odoo systems is very important to us (not only because we use USA Odoo internally), and we consider security problems with the highest priority. We do our best every day to protect USA Odoo users from known security threats, and we welcome all reports of security vulnerabilities discovered by our users and contributors.

Open Source Integrators’ implementation approach to USA Odoo builds on this success, and ensures that customer roles and access rules are properly mapped and tested. Our team has certifications in ITIL.

Conclusion

Open Source Integrators’ highly skilled Odoo experts are dedicated to securing your open source software and providing a unique competitive advantage to harness your full potential.

Leveraging CRM for Property Management with Odoo

mchambreuil — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 23:38:04 +0000

Leveraging CRM for Property Management with Odoo mchambreuil Tue, 09/26/2017 - 16:38

White Paper

Odoo Solutions

CRM

Exceed customer expectations with Odoo to build relationships and a stronger brand. With Odoo-driven CRM best practices, your property management company can scale reliable stakeholder and customer satisfaction, time after time.

Leveraging-CRM-for-Property-Management-with-Open-ERP.pdf

Real Estate Features

Within the broad USA Odoo community, many people have collaborated to create a property management system that has been used successfully in commercial, residential, and multi-unit circumstances. Our experience with using this configuration of USA Odoo has been successful and would provide the basis of this project.

This configuration provides features such as:

Property definitions, including embedded videos, pictures, and other marketing information
Tenant records and contract/lease management
Property maintenance
GFA, operational cost, investment, and occupancy analysis and reporting

See examples of these features below.

Property Definitions

Property Maintenance

Tenant Records & Contract/Lease Management

GFA, Operational Cost, Investment, and Occupancy Reporting

Conclusion

Finally, your property management company’s data, talent, and resources can be deployed to drive your bottom line. Our highly skilled Odoo experts are focused on finding and configuring your unique competitive advantage to harness your full potential.

The accounting integration from USA Odoo empowers your property management company with real-time accounting valuations and deeper reporting on costs and revenues for both upstream and downstream operations.

Integrating your accounting systems into an interconnected nerve system increases the reliability of your numbers, efficiency of your operations, and quality of your output. Open Source Integrators will help you create one true picture of your entire business operation. With the right accounting-centric Odoo software capability, the challenge of defining your key demographics will become simple.

Implementation Process

edward.mcdonald — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 04:17:42 +0000

Implementation Process edward.mcdonald Mon, 09/25/2017 - 21:17

White Paper

Odoo Solutions

BPM

Whether you’re just starting to investigate a migration to an ERP system, or you’ve already installed one and know it’s the software for you, this whitepaper will help you plan for what’s coming. This paper outlines the standard process that Open Source Integrators (OSI) follows for an ERP system roll-out, and brings up important questions and areas of planning for your implementation.

Open-Source-Integrators-Implementation-Process.pdf

Introducing software to run a poorly designed business process will not improve the business process—it will just make that bad process run very fast.

Greg Mader, President, OSI

Open Source ERP Software vs. Proprietary

Once you’ve decided to change your enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, you have made the first of many tough decisions to support this significant business change.

The next two decisions will be:

Which ERP system to use?
Which system integrator to help you?

Selecting an ERP System Integrator

If you are considering Odoo as the ERP software of choice for your organization, understand the philosophy behind open source. It’s somewhat misleading in terms of financial planning, as using open source does not always mean a reduced price for system implementation. However, it does give you many freedoms for use.

One choice you have is to either use the standard software base (this results in a lower time and / or cost investment) or invest more time/money to get a highly-customized system that precisely supports and streamlines your business processes. Your business will likely fall somewhere in between.

Another choice is how much of the implementation work you want to complete in-house vs. how much you want to outsource to a system integrator. It is highly recommended that even with open source options like Odoo, companies work with a system integrator at least for a starting consultation. Often there are variables and criteria for success that must be planned out and considered to lay the foundation for a successful implementation. Companies can do implementations on their own; but careful planning and early consultation are highly valuable for the overall project success.

Above all, you must find a system integrator that you can trust. ERP system implementation gets into the deep and intimate details of your business, and you must feel comfortable sharing that information with your implementation partner. OSI has found through experience that there are common philosophies and implementation approaches that set a company up for success. When researching a system integrator, it is recommended to look for these qualities.

Open Source Integrators Implementation Process

Implementing a new ERP system is an excellent time to reassess your business processes and look for areas of optimization. Software implementation is just one part of the process. An effective system integrator will take you through each of these steps, and provide you with a fresh perspective on how you can change your way of doing business to optimize your work and your use of the ERP system.

OSI recommends the following approach:

STEP 1: Analyze Your Business Systems

OSI would analyze your business systems and their interactions to discover relationships between components and across processes that are often unrecognizable or not immediately visible. We would meet with you in a requirements gathering workshop to listen to your goals and baseline your current situation. In collaboration with you, we would identify the criteria for success, determine schedule and cost requirements, and prototype a new system.

STEP 2: Optimize Critical Areas and Processes

Once the Quickstarter Workshop is complete, OSI would optimize critical areas. We would develop and implement approaches for optimizing inventory, staff or machinery scheduling, materials management, or other systems you have identified as the most vital components of your business.

STEP 3: Build ITSystems to Automate Processes

Once the system is designed and the project is outlined, OSI would automate your now improved processes by building and installing a customized business solution using the Odoo software package. OSI uses Odoo to design an easy-to-use enterprise system for your business, designed around simple workflows.

Even though OSI sets up a project plan, we still follow an agile approach to roll out your system, so that you can start using it sooner, and see quicker results in your business applications. Our goal is for you to see return on your investment as quickly as possible. To support this goal, OSI runs the following work areas concurrently.

STEP 4: Provide Transition Assistance

Once system automation is set up, OSI would provide coaching, training, and warranty support to help you transition to independence. We don’t consider the deployment of technology to be the end of our assistance to you. Because successful implementation of a new system is critical to achieving your return on investment, OSI stands with you, helping you achieve your goals. You invested in the system; we want you to get the ROI.

Benefits of the Process

With any software implementation project, the process and plan should be designed to reduce risk early on and set you up to see early results from your investment. By starting the project with one week dedicated with your team, OSI is able to quickly and effectively assess the needs of your business and reduce the uncertainty of the project.

Your Contribution

Inventory Modeling

edward.mcdonald — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 06:03:04 +0000

Inventory Modeling edward.mcdonald Thu, 11/01/2012 - 23:03

White Paper

Odoo Solutions

What is inventory modeling? Inventory theory (or, more formally, the mathematical theory of inventory and production) is the sub‐specialty within operations research that is concerned with the design of production and inventory systems to minimize costs. It studies the decisions faced by firms in connection with manufacturing, warehousing, spare part allocation and so on. It also provides the mathematical foundation for logistics.

Inventory-Modeling.pdf

The discussion that follows is based on a simple production system consisting of a limited number of raw materials (A, B, and C); a manufacturing system; a single end product (P); and a simple end‐product distribution system, all of which are depicted in the figure below. The two gray boxes represent the major inventory considerations that mathematically translate to temporary storage‐space requirements and associated overhead costs. The illustrations above the two inventory boxes attempt to capture the notion that inventory quantities change over time as raw materials arrive and end products are completed and shipped. (Note: The use of a simple production system allows us to capture the key components within the production system, identify related processes and variables, and conduct mathematical analysis. From there, advanced systems can be developed and analyzed in a similar fashion.)

Why is supply chain management important for small and medium-sized companies?

One of the biggest challenges that they will face, especially when in a start‐up or restructuring mode, is identifying their inventory needs and implementing an effective supply chain management process. In the beginning, it seems like a simple process. The stories that we have heard in the past go something like this:

Production Goal ‐ Near Zero Inventory:

Description: In this scenario, the company leadership’s number one priority is to keep inventory as small as possible. The most common way to achieve this extreme involves “Just‐in‐Time” arrival of raw materials, followed by the immediate manufacturing of the end product and near simultaneous shipment to vendors upon completion of product packaging. In essence, small batches of raw material and end products are occupying space within the constrained workspace.
OR Techniques: Given the “Just‐in‐Time” arrival philosophy, raw materials should be scheduled to arrive when required. Here, the key word is “scheduled.” Therefore, Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and/or Gantt Charting should be used, which focus on production schedules and slack times. PERT is a statistical tool, used in project management, which is designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project. A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart, developed by Henry Gantt that illustrates a project schedule. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Some Gantt charts also show the dependency (i.e., precedence network) relationships between activities. The figure below illustrates how differences in “prep time” of the different parts and the sequencing of production can dictate when certain raw materials need to be available.
Systemic Impact: While this extreme appears desirable, the transportation costs associated with delivery of raw materials and distribution of end products will be excessive. Furthermore, this production goal leaves very little room for unexpected changes in production levels due to either additional orders or production line failures.

Production Goal - Minimize Distribution Costs:

Description: In this scenario, the company leadership’s number one priority is to keep the costs associated with the delivery of the raw materials and distribution of the end products at a minimum. As such, inventory levels of the raw materials and end products are of little concern as long as the space is available.
OR Technique: The company is actually looking to maximize utilization of available storage space. Therefore, the situation becomes one of combinatorial optimization and a solution can be found by restructuring the situation as a Knapsack Problem.
Systemic Impact: While this appears to be a rather simple approach to the inventory problem, space can be costly. Furthermore, production levels become dependent on available space in that the company cannot make the product unless there is a place to store it before shipping.

It does not take long to realize that the optimal solution to a company’s inventory management lies somewhere between these two extremes. Additional OR techniques are available to provide the decision makers mathematical solutions to their inventory concerns. The most common approach is to determine the Economic Order Quantity (EOQ), which is the order quantity that minimizes total inventory holding costs and ordering costs. It is one of the oldest classical production scheduling models.

EOQ applies only when:

Demand for a product is constant over the year.
Each new order is delivered in full when inventory reaches zero.
There is a fixed cost for each order placed, regardless of the number of units ordered.
There a cost for each unit held in storage2.

The graphic below is one visual representation of the EOQ over time. The light blue vertical lines represent the arrival of a new order whereas the light blue diagonal lines represent the constant demand. This particular representation introduces one additional planning factor (modification to EOQ) known as safety stock, which is determined by the management.

The variables required to determine a company’s EOQ are:

Order Quantity
Annual Demand Quantity
Fixed Cost per Order
Annual Holding Costs

However, rarely do things remain constant, but there is still hope for management. Dynamic Lot Size Models exist that are designed to address varying demand, varying costs, multiple customers, etc.

In closing, company management should always be prepared for the “rainy day” scenarios whether it be from production line failures, transportation problems, surge orders, etc. OR Techniques are designed to provide “Scientific Solutions” to company problems, however it is by great leadership and management where companies obtain the competitive advantage. Open Source Integrators can help you maximize both.

1 Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventory_models, accessed 4 June, 2012.

2 Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_order_quantity, accessed 6 June, 2012