Duration: 21:21
🧾 Analytical Summary
🚗 Context & Partnership
Lucas, a senior consultant at Deloitte, presents alongside Steven Peters, IT Manager and Head of Cyber Security at Mobility Plus, showcasing how a rapidly scaling EV charging company uses Odoo as its core operational platform. Deloitte's Odoo practice focuses specifically on scaleups and startups, making Mobility Plus an ideal case study for demonstrating platform capabilities in high-growth environments.
Mobility Plus's mission: accelerate the transition to green energy by enabling everyone to charge electric vehicles carefree, green, and smartly. The company exemplifies the startup-to-scaleup journey, growing from one CEO and 35 charging points in 2016 to nearly 100 employees managing 6.2 million charging sessions and 143 million kilowatt-hours by end of 2025.
Their charging card and app provide access to over 700,000 charging points across Europe, delivering on the "carefree" promise of ubiquitous EV charging infrastructure.
🇧🇪 Why Odoo?
Several factors drove Mobility Plus toward Odoo:
Belgian Pride: Mobility Plus prefers doing business with Belgian companies, keeping partnerships local when possible—aligning with their sustainability and community values.
Open Source Flexibility: Open source enables Mobility Plus to apply patches, make adjustments, and maintain development autonomy. The large community provides support and shared innovation.
Customization Reality: Standard ERP solutions are never one-size-fits-all. There's always gap between theoretical functionality and actual business needs. Odoo's architecture makes customization straightforward—and Mobility Plus has implemented extensive customizations.
No Vendor Lock-In: The open source model and ability to self-host prevents dependence on single vendors for critical business operations.
🔧 Key Integrations & Custom Workflows
Mobility Plus built substantial custom functionality on top of Odoo's core:
OCPP Partner Integration: Charging session data flows from 700,000+ European charging stations via OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) partners—Mobility Plus doesn't manage these integrations directly, focusing instead on their core competency.
Subcontractor Planning: Installation and maintenance scheduling for subcontractors runs entirely within Odoo, coordinating field operations.
Custom Workflows: Business-specific processes adapted to EV charging industry requirements and regulatory compliance.
Automatic Inspection Integration: Systems automatically interface with inspection companies, ensuring installations receive certification without manual intervention.
Order Fulfillment Automation: Charging pass orders placed through the customer portal flow completely automatically through the system—no human touch required from order to fulfillment.
Mobile & Web Apps: Consumer-facing applications built on Odoo's backend API layer, providing seamless user experiences while leveraging Odoo's business logic.
📊 Portal & Dashboard Capabilities
The customer-facing portal delivers rich functionality for fleet and facility managers:
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Real-time visibility into charging costs, enabling financial planning and budgeting.
Average Charging Costs: Per-vehicle and per-session analytics helping organizations optimize charging strategies.
ESG Reporting: CO₂ savings calculations supporting environmental, social, and governance reporting requirements—increasingly critical for corporate sustainability mandates.
Smart Home Energy Management: The app manages home charging stations, automatically reading mileage via car APIs (preventing odometer fraud common with fuel cards), and intelligently managing capacity to avoid peak tariff penalties.
🏗️ Architecture & Technical Decisions
Mobility Plus runs on Azure cloud infrastructure with a critical architectural decision: separating the Odoo application from the Odoo database. They migrated to native Azure PostgreSQL for several advantages:
Scalability: Cloud-native database services scale more elegantly than traditional deployments.
Security: Separating web application from data layer is fundamental security practice—if the web tier is compromised, the data layer remains protected behind additional barriers.
The architecture connects: - Frontend: Mobile app and web portal - Backend API Layer: Custom APIs interfacing with Odoo - Odoo Application: Business logic and workflow engine - PostgreSQL Database: Data persistence layer - External Integrations: Charging stations, Zendesk support, Exact Online (finance), and Microsoft Fabric (analytics)
Zendesk Integration: Support tickets automatically pull customer and installation data from Odoo, giving agents complete context immediately.
Finance Migration: Currently using Exact Online for financial operations, but migrating to Odoo's native financial modules by year-end—consolidating into a single system of record.
Data Fabric: All operational data flows into Microsoft Fabric for advanced analytics, reporting, and dashboard creation—handling massive datasets (6.2 million sessions, 143 million kWh) that would overwhelm transactional databases.
🔄 Major Version Migration (V14 → V18)
Mobility Plus executed a significant migration from Odoo V14 to V18—a challenging undertaking requiring careful planning and execution:
Six-Month Project: Full migration timeline with as much code freeze as possible (though pragmatism required some flexibility).
Module-by-Module Approach: Testing each module individually rather than big-bang migration, reducing risk and enabling targeted troubleshooting.
Extensive Testing: Multiple testing layers—developers, dedicated QA testers, full integration testing, and comprehensive user acceptance testing (though UAT never catches everything real users do).
Dry Run Execution: Weekend dress rehearsal to staging environment identifying issues before production cutover.
Production Weekend: Friday evening shutdown, database export, migration execution, restoration, and intensive Sunday testing before Monday go-live.
Three-Week Hypercare: Post-launch support period monitoring for issues—fortunately finding only minor problems since major scenarios were well-tested.
📈 Migration Benefits
The V14 to V18 upgrade delivered substantial value:
New Features: Major version jumps bring significant functionality improvements unavailable in older versions.
Code Cleanup: Removed 15,000 lines of custom Python code (roughly 30% of custom codebase) and 4,000 lines of XML—features that became standard in V18 or were no longer needed.
Technical Debt Reduction: Eliminated historical code from startup phase when every customer received custom solutions. Now standardizing on product approach: "This is our product; we can incorporate good ideas, but cannot customize for every workflow."
Future-Proofing: Less custom code means easier future migrations—next upgrade should take 3-4 months instead of 6.
Security Improvements: Less code equals less attack surface and fewer potential vulnerabilities.
6% VAT Automation: Previously custom code for Belgian housing tax rules (6% VAT on installations for 10+ year old homes) became standard functionality.
MPS/SEPA Scores: Custom modules for payment compliance now available out-of-the-box.
🤝 Deloitte Partnership
Deloitte's engagement focuses on areas where Mobility Plus's internal team lacks bandwidth or specialized expertise:
Process-Driven Approach: Deloitte always starts with process analysis, not solution selection—understanding workflows before implementing tools.
Financial Expertise: Leveraging Deloitte's financial services knowledge to optimize accounting, controlling, and reporting—often neglected during fast-growth phases.
Key Account Management: Implementing frameworks for managing large customers with multiple sites and complex contracts—currently manual Excel processes that need systematization.
Contract Management: Standard Odoo lacks robust contract tracking, so custom development enables on-the-fly insights into contract status and key account relationships without constant spreadsheet exports.
Controlling & Reporting: Mobility Plus has strong day-to-day operations and application framework, but limited visibility into business performance through controlling dashboards and KPIs—Deloitte's focus area for improvement.
💡 Scaleup Nature
Steven acknowledges Mobility Plus epitomizes scaleup challenges: "We move ahead, we move fast, we have to move fast. It's a fast-moving area. Governance stays a little bit behind sometimes." This tension between velocity and control typifies the startup-to-scaleup transition.
Deloitte's value proposition specifically addresses this gap—bringing structure, best practices, and governance to companies that successfully built products and captured markets but now need operational maturity.
🧠 Viewpoint: Odoo Perspective
⚠️ Disclaimer: AI-generated creative perspective inspired by Odoo's vision.
Mobility Plus exemplifies exactly why we built Odoo as an open, flexible platform rather than rigid vertical software. They're operating at the intersection of energy, mobility, payments, IoT, and consumer apps—no off-the-shelf solution handles that complexity. By using Odoo as their operational backbone, they focus development resources on what differentiates them (EV charging intelligence, user experience) rather than rebuilding CRM, inventory, or accounting from scratch.
The architecture decision separating application from database shows sophisticated thinking—they're using Odoo at scale, not just as a simple business app. And the migration story (eliminating 30% of custom code as features became standard) proves our development philosophy: keep building the 80% that everyone needs, so partners and customers can focus on the 20% that makes them unique. Their journey from startup chaos to scaleup structure, with Odoo adapting alongside them, is exactly the growth story we enable.
🏢 Viewpoint: Competitors (SAP / Microsoft / Others)
⚠️ Disclaimer: AI-generated fictional commentary. Not an official corporate statement.
Mobility Plus's case highlights both the power and risk of open-source platforms for critical business operations. The customization flexibility enabled rapid market entry and feature development, but the migration complexity (six months, extensive testing, weekend cutover) demonstrates the technical debt accumulated when building heavily on any platform—open or proprietary.
The architecture separating Odoo application from Azure PostgreSQL is sound practice, though enterprises typically require more sophisticated high-availability, disaster recovery, and geo-redundancy configurations than described. The fact that they're consolidating financial operations into Odoo (replacing Exact Online) suggests confidence in the platform's maturity, though this increases dependency on a single system for mission-critical operations.
The Deloitte partnership addresses a common scaleup gap: brilliant engineers building product, but lacking financial controls and business intelligence maturity. Enterprises typically start with these capabilities from day one, but startups correctly prioritize product-market fit over governance. The challenge is retrofitting structure without losing agility—where specialized consulting becomes valuable regardless of platform choice.
Disclaimer: This article contains AI-generated summaries and fictionalized commentaries for illustrative purposes. Viewpoints labeled as "Odoo Perspective" or "Competitors" are simulated and do not represent any real statements or positions. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.