Odoo serves the leading Chandlery of the Caribbean

It was a very special project. Odoo Experts that Odoo has implemented in the Caribbean. We were on site in the last week before the Corona lock-down. After the global outbreak of the pandemic, we continued the project online. And in record time!

Organisation: Budget Marine N.V.

Locations: St. Maarten, Antigua, Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Grenada, St. Kitts, St. Thomas, Trinidad

Industry: Retail and Wholesale for Marine Equipment

Partner name: Odoo Experts B.V.

Odoo Experts Consultants: Bastiaan de Keijzer, Erwin van der Ploeg, Ruchir Shukla

Apps Implemented: Sales, Warehouse, Purchase, Accounting, Point of Sales, Consolidation, Project, Documents, Inventory

Organization size: 115 employees

Number of Odoo users: 110

Hostingtype: Odoo.sh dedicated

Budget Marine

Budget Marine is the leading supplier in marine and boat maintenance supplies in the Caribbean. They sell marine equipment from 12 stores across 9 different countries in this region. Their product range of 65.000 products are purchased from all over the world and are supplied from their warehouse locations in Sint Maarten and Trinidad.

Budget Marine contacted Odoo Experts in January of 2020 with the question whether we could deliver a Warehouse Management Systems and interface this with a newly bought cash register system.

Erwin van der Ploeg: “We gave two demonstrations of Odoo. Not only the Odoo WMS, but also all the other possibilities like Sales, Point of Sales and Accounting were shown. Budget Marine was impressed by the possibilities of Odoo. This led to the decision to put the purchase of the new cash register system on hold.

Later, Odoo Experts was asked to conduct a Gap analysis of Odoo for Budget Marine on the island of Sint Maarten. After one intensive week on the location, we had all the information we needed to scope the project and we took the last airplane back before the Corona lock-down in the Caribbean and the Netherlands started.”

Anton Blok: “Odoo Experts has proven to be the right choice for our transition to Odoo. With 5 base currencies, 9 tax jurisdictions, 13 locations and over 60,000 items, we needed a partner that was organized, reliable and efficient…..and we had 4 ½ months to get it done.

Together with Odoo Experts, the team of Budget Marine managed to go from initial presentation in January 2020 to live on July 1st, 2020. In the process we reviewed workflows, designed customizations, implemented training schedules, and dealt with Covid-19.

A transition from one ERP to another is never easy, and despite all the planning there is no way to anticipate all the complications that inevitably arise, and our transition was no different, we had issues pop up. However, thanks to the joint BM/OE team’s preparation and expertise, we managed them and resolved them well.

I recommend and commend Erwin and his team, job well done” - Anton Blok, Budget Marine.

The Project

Due to the corona outbreak, the start of the project was completely different than anticipated anticipated. All stakeholders worked from home, which added an extra challenge to the implementation. The project team quickly concluded that this challenge also had an advantage. All warehouses and shops were closed, so everyone could work on the Odoo project.

Following challenges had to be entered/integrated into Odoo:

● 9 companies/countries

● 12 warehouses

● 17 Point of Sales (with barcode scanners and receipt printers))

● 59.000 contacts

● 65.000 products and variants

● 8 currencies

● Intercompany-sales

● Ventor tech Barcode Warehouse-solution (https://ventor.app)

● Slim4 Stock optimization Interface (https://www.slimstock.com)

The biggest challenges were speeding-up the POS in order to be able to load 65.000 products and the development of multi currency in the Odoo Point of Sale App. On the islands in the Caribbean people pay with multiple currencies. This means that something that is sold in USD, can be partially paid in USD and partially in EUR. Moreover, this can be done in cash and card. The customization we made in the Odoo POS makes this conversion option super-fast and possible to pay with multiple currencies.

To optimize the stock and the purchase of new stock, Budget Marine uses the stock optimization tool Slim4 from Slimstock. Odoo Experts has made an interface to deliver daily sales, stock and purchase information to calculate optimized stock. Slim4 produces a daily purchase order file that is imported into Odoo.

Ventortech's Odoo barcode scanning solution was chosen for the largest warehouse on Sint Maarten. This scanning application has been extended with an additional priority selection method, to send the order pickers to priority bins instead of using the standard Odoo FIFO. The Android scanner application has many more features than the default Odoo scan application and is also more user-friendly.

Because of the expiration of the old software solution on 1 July 2020, Budget Marine went live, only 3 months after the start of the project. A great achievement from everyone involved and just on time for the end of the lockdown and the returning of their customers.

“Thank you so far for all the hard work over the last few days, weeks or actually months. We landed the plane and I am honestly really happy on how hard or actually more like how soft we landed today! Most locations they have been selling, purchasing, receiving transferring between branches etc, etc. We did extra training, and all was received well.”

Carlijn van Bergen - Projectmanager Budget Marine

Odoo Experts B.V.

Odoo Experts is the leading Odoo Gold Partner since 2012. Odoo Experts started working with Odoo as of version 6 and has a proven track record of over 100 Odoo projects. Odoo Experts is located in Zaandam (next to Amsterdam) in the Netherlands and has a great team of consultants who help everyone that needs help on implementing and using Odoo.

They keep challenging customers to keep things simple instead of rushing into customizations. They are real experts of Odoo and are experienced in retail, wholesale and service companies. The consultants of Odoo Experts like a challenge and know all the possibilities of Odoo he consultants of Odoo Experts like a challenge and know all the possibilities of Odoo and when not standard functionality, they now how to make it.

Odoo serves the leading Chandlery of the Caribbean
Erwin van der Ploeg March 21, 2021
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