Odoo ERP implementation for a bicycle manufacturer

About the Customer

American Bicycle Group has you covered, no matter what bike enthusiast you are. With three brands, American Bicycle Group has your perfect bike, made in Chattanooga, USA. Litespeed creates the best-performing titanium bikes. The company also made the titanium framework for the Mars Curiosity Rover. Quintana Roo is made for triathletes and has your wetsuits covered. OBED Bikes are made for everything from everyday commutes to once-in-a-lifetime expeditions, OBED has your favorite bike.

The Challenges – Before Implementing Odoo

Using multiple business applications

ABG used Salesforce as CRM to keep notes on customer conversations and LiveChat to facilitate customer chats. ShipStation was used for creating shipping labels. SAP was used for inventory and production tracking and accounting. The company also used Shopify for its websites, without integrating them with SAP.

Struggles with planning and monitoring

ABG’s bikes have many options, resulting in hundreds of thousands of potential product variations. Each bike is made to order, which requires an engineer to review each sale and define every component needed.

Once a bike was purchased from the website, a sales representative would have to transfer the order into SAP manually, create a Bill of Materials (BOM), and print manufacturing orders for the production floor.

If a customer wanted to change their order, a sales rep would need to check and locate the product’s assembly state. Then, the representative would inform the production staff of the required changes, and they would record a note about the change. Even if a customer wanted only to check the status of their order, a sales rep would need to go to the production floor to check the production status.

ERP inventory levels were often incorrect, causing production schedulers to be unable to rely on system data and to deal with production orders on paper. Assembly staff frequently upgraded components due to availability issues without logging changes quickly (or at all). This all made it hard to understand stock levels and production lead times.

The Solution – Consolidating into Odoo ERP

Steersman’s Odoo implementation replaced Salesforce, LiveChat, ShipStation, and SAP. We added an integration between Odoo and Shopify, which pulls in orders and matches products in Odoo to Shopify. Because products don’t have individual part numbers for each variation, we match the product model and product attribute details. Other benefits of Odoo’s Shopify integration, written by Steersman, include:

• Payments and deposits are auto-created in Odoo, and discounts are automatically routed for bookkeeping
• Shopify fulfillment status is automatically updated once the product ships in Odoo
• Configuration for mapping Shopify shipping choices to Odoo shipping methods

Steersman’s CPQ and Dynamic BOM modules automatically create the necessary bill of materials for each product sold. Steersman’s shipping label app creates shipping labels for FedEx, UPS, and USPS. Our production status notification module sends customers email updates once specific manufacturing steps have been completed. We also improved Odoo’s chat app to replicate some functionality ABG liked from LiveChat.

The Results

Now, orders placed through Shopify appear in Odoo automatically — the exact product is matched in Odoo, then prices, taxes, discounts, and the payment are created. Once the order is confirmed, all necessary manufacturing orders are made with all the proper components on them.

Several hundred thousand unique bills of materials for each product are generated automatically from 100-300 dynamic BOM rules, including BOMs using sub-assemblies that have thousands of variations of their own. Inventory tracking and component availability are live and accurate. Pre-sale, order, production information, and accounting are all in a single system, making it easy to track conversations, order conversions, and business performance. Odoo handles order management, production, component planning, shipping, emailing customer order statuses, and shipping notifications, all while updating statuses on Shopify.

Odoo apps used

Odoo app spotlight

Steersman’s Odoo modules used by client

Some of the custom modules ABG uses include:

• PIM – Used to manage product information better
• Dynamic BOM – With only a handful of rules, create thousands of unique and accurate bills of materials
• Steersman Configurator (CPQ) – Define rules for product option selection defaults and incompatibilities
• Shopify integration – Automate order entry from Shopify to Odoo and update fulfillment statuses when shipped
• Live Chat enhancement – a multitude of enhancements to improve Odoo’s chat application
• EasyPost shipping – Rate shop, estimate, and ship parcels right from Odoo
• Shipping workstations – Define printers for documents, labels, and more to print from Odoo directly to office printers

How Steersman can help you

We offer superior stability and data security and are continuously improving on top of Odoo. Steersman will make Odoo work for you and your business.

Contact us or learn more about our pricing.