All Trans Logistic: from a legacy server and spreadsheets to Odoo

Overview

All Trans Logistic is a transport and logistics company. Its daily operations ran on two things: an on-premise application installed on an old Windows server that staff reached over remote desktop, and a set of Excel spreadsheets built up internally over the years.

Both had become a risk to the business, and the company asked us to replace them without disrupting the work they supported.

The challenge

• The on-premise application was costly to maintain, and the ageing server underneath it needed regular attention. Moving to the vendor’s current version would have meant a very large migration bill for the same software.
• The spreadsheets carried much of the operational logic, and the person who had built them had left the company. Nobody could change them with confidence, and every workaround added another file.
• Everything went through one machine, reached over remote desktop, which kept the data out of reach of the company’s other tools.

The solution

Rather than paying to upgrade the old application, we moved the company onto Odoo. The rule was simple: use the standard wherever the standard fits, and build only where the business is genuinely specific.

• Inventory and Invoicing, Odoo’s native apps. Inventory is used close to standard, which keeps future Odoo upgrades straightforward.
• A custom freight-chartering module, designed and built by our team for affrètement: the part of the business the spreadsheets used to carry, and that no standard app covers.
• Outlook integration, so the team keeps working in the mail tool it already uses, with messages linked to the records in Odoo.

Results

Operations now run in one system instead of a remote server and a folder of spreadsheets.

• No legacy server to maintain, and no vendor migration bill.
• The chartering logic lives in software that is documented and maintained, instead of in files only their author understood.
• Stock, chartering and invoicing share the same data, so information is entered once and follows the job through to the invoice.
• A standard base that can take on more of Odoo’s apps as the company needs them.