/industries
Odoo for distribution and retail
Know your stock, prices and credit before the truck leaves.
- 15+ Warehouses across 3 companies
- 1,800+ SKUs managed live
- 3,400+ Customer outlets across 35+ delivery routes
/where-it-breaks
Where it breaks, before anyone mentions software.
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01
Returned and damaged stock has nowhere to go.
When the process has no place for returns, repairs and damage, that stock ends up mixed in with everything else. Nobody can say what is sellable and what is waiting for repair. One distributor we work with now runs about a third of its warehouses just to hold this stock.
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02
Every customer has a different price, and you cannot prove it.
Discounts vary by customer, by route and by price tier, and each one lives wherever the sales rep keeps it. Two reps can quote the same customer two prices. Standard price lists cannot reproduce this, so the discount logic has to be rebuilt line by line.
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03
Delivery routes depend on the rep who knows them.
Who visits which outlet, and on which day, sits in the rep's head. You cannot check a route, grow it, or replace the rep without losing it.
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04
Credit is checked after the delivery, not before.
An order is created and delivered without anyone asking whether the customer is already over their limit. You see the exposure afterwards, when it is too late to stop it.
/configuration-choices
Five decisions we make early
- One structure for every company and warehouse, from day one. Main, return, repair, damage and showroom stock each get their own location, so you always know what you can sell. See Inventory and warehouse.
- A discount engine on top of standard price lists. Route and customer pricing calculates itself, so the right price no longer depends on who takes the order. See CRM and sales.
- Routes and itineraries built into Odoo. Pre-orders link to outlets and the day's route becomes the day's sales orders, so a route survives a change of rep.
- Credit limits checked when the order is created. Only accounting managers can override, so overexposure is stopped, not reported. See Accounting and finance.
- Lot tracking only where batch or expiry matters. Warehouse staff are not slowed down scanning products that do not need it.
/what-we-will-not-do
And five we argue against
- We will not migrate your full sales history. Only open balances and active products move, and the rest stays archived. Go-live is quicker and your data is cleaner.
- We will not assume a mobile sales-force app in phase one. It is scoped on its own once the core distribution process is solid, so you do not pay for it twice.
- We will not track every product by lot. It applies only to the SKUs where batch or expiry genuinely matters.
- We will not let every user see every warehouse. Access is restricted per warehouse and per employee by design, not left open by default.
- We will not automate van loading before route and credit control are proven. Sequence matters more than coverage.
/next
Tell us what you are running today.
Twenty minutes, no slides. We will tell you straight if Odoo is not the answer.