COOPERATION BEGINNING
In June of 2021, Smart Tek started cooperating with Bluesky Solutions from the UK. It is a packaging wholesaler and a care products manufacturer that wants to create an effective and multitasking ERP system for internal operations. After a thorough discussion, we agreed on the upgrades required to join the current team working on the integrated management.
We have established a good relationship, and they support us greatly during these very challenging times.
This case study will describe the client, their problem, and the solutions implemented. We believe it would help you to see our competency and approach.
CUSTOMER’S BUSINESS
Bluesky Solutions serve the Personal Care, Cosmetic, Pharmaceutical, and Health & Beauty markets. They supply innovative and cost-effective packages from stock as well as bespoke items.
Their stock ranges from plastic, aluminum, glass, and wooden bottles, jars, etc. Huge stock availability means Bluesky supplies production quantities fast, offering competitive pricing without ‘manufacturer’ lead times or minimum order quantities. The company size is between 40-50 employees.
TEAM
Before Smart Tek joined the development team, the British development company started working on the ERP system. They have worked on the management system for 2+ years, and we joined them almost a year ago.
The number of requests for business process automation and improvement of existing business processes required the involvement of another team of developers with a high level of expertise in the Odoo system in the area of Manufacturing, Inventory, Accounting, Reporting, and Sales. Besides, one more team is working on a functional e-commerce website that has recently been integrated with Odoo.
CHALLENGES AND OBJECTIVES
Smart Tek was invited to upgrade and improve the current ERP system with modern ‘filling’. They needed more customization and functionality to make key business parts like accounting, sales, inventory control, reporting, and manufacturing more suitable to their business model.
COMMUNICATION BETWEEN MANAGERS AND TEAMS
The project has a Project Manager from Smart Tek who directly communicates with the client (Wojciech Betyna – Systems & IT Manager, Danny Shiels – Head of Operations). The Project Manager is a kind of Smart Tek representative who gets tasks and corrections from the client and sends them to the development team.
They discuss them without the client, find the most suitable solutions, and the representative gets back to the customer. And it is repeated several times until a final solution is agreed upon and implemented.
SMART TEK APPROACH AND IMPLEMENTED SOLUTIONS
The project is extensive, and every team’s development process is going on. We are constantly exchanging our processes to keep them adjusted. Generally, our main approach is to add fractional refinements to production to improve and facilitate work processes at the plant with a more effective ERP.
DASHBOARD
We created a functional invoice dashboard that took 100+ hours of development, consultations, and testing. It is based on the Odoo platform and will suit other clients too. It is a debtor dashboard for default three dates that include all credits, payments, and invoices.
UNRESERVED QUANTITY
We added Unreserved Quantity as a measure to the Forecast report. This module allows users to check the quantity of a stocked product available on hand and has not yet been reserved for use anywhere else. This improves visibility of a free stock over long periods of time and helps sales department in making important selling and purchasing decisions.
MRP MODULE IMPROVEMENTS
We worked on MRP module customizations:
🔹 Developers added smart buttons and actions for Sale Order / Manufacturing Order. This has reduced the time spent searching for related SO/MO significantly, allowing people to focus on more important tasks and it also improved navigation around the system and visibility of documents related to each other.
🔹 We added ability to attach product specifications (PDF) to BOM that can be displayed on Work Order.
🔹 We have developed an entire custom section with tabs directly in MO section. This was done to remove the need of recording huge amount of data on a paper copy, effectively reducing the time needed to record the data, reduce human error factor, improve data visibility and accessibility and ultimately reduce the cost of administrative tasks. The solution consists of new fields such as multi-line text, date fields, auto-calculated fields, photo attachment fields, signature fields.
🔹 We have developed a custom quality check page for MRP that can be triggered as a pop-up based on time conditions while MO is in progress. This was developed to enforce more strict quality checks on production lines.
CUSTOM SALE REPORTS
We improved the search, added a percentage view in a pivot, and added new fields, queries, and filters in the Sale Report. That makes analyzing process easier and more effective.
SOFT STOCK RESERVATION
We have improved an entirely new stock reservation logic for Odoo to allow stock moves on reserved stock quants without manual unreserve and re-reserving the stock to original operations. The project was the key part of Bluesky’s barcode scanning implementation within their business and ultimately reduced the need to manually record stock moves on paper before doing it on the system.
This has significantly reduced operational costs and time and eliminated human errors to almost zero! It is worth mentioning that the solution works great with the popular 3rd party app Ventor
CREDITSAFE INTEGRATION
We developed an integration for the CreditSafe platform to allow the finance department to quickly check customers’ credit ratings directly from Odoo. This resulted in a big reduction of time taken to perform related tasks outside of Odoo, and it also added extra reporting abilities associated with customers’ credit abilities.
NETSTOCK INTEGRATION
We added functionality for downloading SFTP files from the NetStock server to the Odoo server and created a function to read the data from downloaded files to convert them to Purchase Orders / Manufacturing Orders.
SYNCHRONIZED TELEPHONY
We are currently working on synchronizing the 3CX Phone System with Odoo, including calls, call logs, etc. This will provide synchronized reporting capabilities that can be used for CRM reporting purposes.
ODOO SYSTEM UPGRADE
After we added many implementations, the company decided to upgrade ERP. Therefore, we upgraded Odoo from a 13E to a 15E version with all solutions developed earlier.
VALUE DELIVERED
Bluesky now has an ERP system tailored to its business needs. The time spent on customization added significant value to all aspects of operational functions: reporting, information processing, data visibility, process control, inventory management, and many more.
The ultimate goal is to continue working on a bespoke all-in-one ERP solution that can replace all other software needs and automate as many processes as possible.
