Service companies: optimize your business processes with Odoo

  • 22 Dec 2022

With the release of version 16 and the recent reduction of its prices, the Odoo solution continues to make headlines. Among the different aspects at the origin of the success story of Fabien Pinckaers' company, there is certainly the capacity of its solution to address all the needs of a company. Let's see together how service companies can see their daily life greatly simplified thanks to Odoo!

 

On-site work

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To manage the activity of the company, the Sales, Project and Employees modules of Odoo will allow to manage the whole activity from the follow-up of the employees' skills to the invoicing of the services. Here are some key features of these modules.

 

 

Competency management

 

With the Competency Management module, it is possible to integrate their CVs and competencies on the employee files. On each of them, you can also enter a level of expertise. Thus, it is possible to simply identify the right person for a given mission.

 

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Sales management integrated with project management

 

To make the transition from selling a service to its realization more fluid, Odoo fully integrates its sales management with the project module. You can therefore sell a service and see the project and associated tasks automatically generated in the project management.


Timesheets

 

Once the mission is assigned, Odoo offers a timesheet management module to track the time spent on it. It will allow you to create timesheets, but also to manage a validation workflow and finally to follow the time spent on each mission.

 

Billing of timesheets

 

Since project management is fully integrated with the sales module, it is possible, directly from the purchase order, to generate invoices for a period based on the timesheets associated with the project. These same timesheets will appear in the details of the invoice that your customer will receive.

 

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Agile project management

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To facilitate the management of your projects, the Odoo project module provides all the necessary functionalities for the management of your projects. And this, whatever the methodology used, agile or V-cycle and the invoicing mode, time and materials or fixed price.


Let's review the major features of this module.

 

The Kanban view of a project

 

This view allows you to organize all the tasks of your project on a customizable Kanban board. You can then simply drag and drop your tasks to move them from one stage to another.

 

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Track the progress of your project

 

To track the progress of your project, you can use the burndown chart view which is updated in real time according to the project progress. In addition to this indicator, Odoo allows you to enter a project milestone at the end of each sprint. Therefore, you can keep track of the project status over time.

 

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Time-based or milestone-based billing

 

When writing the order, depending on your services, you can invoice according to the time spent based on timesheets or based on invoicing milestones.


In both cases, Odoo allows you to issue a detailed order allowing your customer to follow the evolution of the delivery of his service as well as the resulting invoicing.

 

Project planning

 

Odoo's Gantt view allows you to organize the project tasks in time and to easily display the relationships between the different planned actions. This view also allows you to follow the assignment of tasks and the evolution of the workload during the project.

 

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Monitoring of your project's KPIs

 

All the data of a project are centralized by Odoo in the same view in order to have a synthetic vision of the progress of the project.

 

Suivi KPIs

 

Customer support and maintenance

 

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As far as your maintenance customers are concerned, Odoo has a helpdesk module that offers several key features allowing you to gain efficiency in managing your maintenance customers.

 

Customer portal

 

First of all, Odoo provides a portal mode accessible via a web interface that will allow your customers to open tickets, but also to exchange on those in progress.

 

 

 
Automatic assignment of tickets

 

To fluidify the allocation of tickets, you can create several teams and add rules for automatic allocation of requests.


Billing and timesheets

 

To track the time spent and eventually billed against it, just as it is possible to add timesheets to a task, it is possible to do so for a helpdesk ticket. The time spent can be considered as non-billable and kept only for the purpose of analyzing the profitability of a team, or it can be linked to a customer purchase order so that it can be billed according to the terms of the order.


SLAs management

 

For each team, Odoo allows to define SLAs. These rules can be adapted according to the type of ticket or customer. You can then, from your dashboard, easily visualize the tickets that do not respect the SLAs and therefore need special attention.

 

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What about my project?

These scenarios we have described are of course generic cases. In fact, each company has its own specificities. This is why Odoo, in addition to the numerous native functionalities that we have described in this article, can be enriched through specific developments in order to fully meet your business challenges. To do this, Smile can help you analyze your project and integrate Odoo into your IS.

 

Indeed, Odoo is a historical partner of Smile!


Since its inception in 2008, our partnership with Odoo has grown stronger: we are now the largest French integrator of the solution. During this period, we had the opportunity to implement this solution through several of our ESN clients and many others. We would be delighted to share our experience with you.