Duration: 24:59
PART 1 — Analytical Summary 🚀
Context 💼
This session at Odoo Experience featured Emily and Gon, business analysts from Camptocamp (an Odoo Gold Partner since 2006), alongside Nicolas, President of POP—a French specialist in corporate gifts and branded premiums. POP serves 38,000 customers, processes ~65,000 orders per year, and reports €47M in annual turnover across e-commerce (sites like Pandakola and Objama), marketplaces via Mirakl, and private corporate shops. The team presented how they implemented a full-scale retail and light manufacturing flow in Odoo 17, consolidating disparate systems (e.g., Magento, Salesforce, and more) into a single platform for CRM/ERP/WMS. The goal: end-to-end operations in Odoo—from quotation to accounting—while minimizing manual touches and improving time-to-fulfillment.
Core Ideas & Innovations 🧠
POP’s model has no “finished product” by default: each sale involves a raw item plus a customization (“marking”), often executed by subcontractors. To reflect this reality, Camptocamp introduced a robust notion of the Section on the sales order—“one section = one procurement group”—linking the raw product, its marking technique (a service), and all related parameters. This enabled granular control at the section level for routes, suppliers, dates, and approvals.
To give back-office users CMS-like flexibility, the team built a back-end Product Configurator. The key innovation is the intermediate concept of a Marking Surface (a combination of zone + dimension, such as “sleeve 25×25 cm”), which bridges the gap between product variants and service-based marking techniques. The configurator ensures the right quantities and assets (e.g., logos) are captured for the design team, keeping the product structure consistent and traceable.
Another significant shift was a “design-first” workflow. Instead of Odoo creating stock moves and POs on order confirmation, the flow pauses to create a Project per sale order and a Task per section. Only after the design is validated (e.g., status set to “RFP validated”) can users manually trigger procurement using a dedicated “Launch Replenishment” action. This gating avoids premature purchasing and reduces costly errors.
The heart of replenishment is the Procurement Path—a strategic object that consolidates routes (e.g., Dropship), supplier and subcontractor choices, lead times (ordering, production, transport), and prices derived from vendor price lists. Paths can be suggested automatically from existing vendor data and routes, offering alternatives such as direct dropship from a subcontractor vs. a supplier-to-subcontractor transfer, then delivery. Paths also support section-specific price overrides that propagate to resulting purchase orders. The system creates one procurement group per section but can merge flows when both sections share the same supplier/subcontractor, optimizing PO and delivery consolidation.
Technically, the project stayed on Odoo 17 despite the availability of v18, preserving prior custom work. The team integrated Odoo with a PIM and external suppliers via APIs for products, contacts, vendor price lists, orders, and transport tracking—making “touchless” automation feasible while keeping a controlled, manual approval step where it matters.
Impact & Takeaways ⚙️
This architecture simplifies a complex, multi-actor fulfillment value chain:
- Design approvals are embedded in the operational flow, preventing premature stock and purchasing and reducing rework.
- Section-level control maps to real-world production: you can advance parts of an order while others remain in design.
- The Procurement Path abstracts multi-party logistics, pricing, and timing into a reusable, suggestible pattern—cutting decision time and standardizing outcomes.
- A CMS-like back-office configurator ensures consistent capture of marking zones, dimensions, and techniques, improving UX and data quality.
- Centralization into Odoo reduces system sprawl and enables unified reporting, marketing automation on a single customer base (~100k contacts), and end-to-end traceability.
The project went live after an 18‑month cycle with thorough gap analysis. Early user feedback highlights an easy-to-use, high-quality solution and a strong foundation for rolling Odoo out to other entities in the POP group. 💬
PART 2 — Viewpoint: Odoo Perspective
Disclaimer: AI-generated creative perspective inspired by Odoo’s vision.
What I love here is how the team modeled reality instead of forcing it into rigid structures. Sections, marking surfaces, procurement paths—these are simple ideas that become powerful when they work together. They let users think in terms of outcomes: design first, then procure with confidence.
This is precisely why we build Odoo as an integrated suite. Once data flows from e-commerce to PIM to procurement, you don’t need five tools to run one process. You get fewer clicks, fewer mistakes, and more time for the things that matter—like great products and happy customers. The community’s ingenuity keeps showing how far simplicity can scale.
PART 3 — Viewpoint: Competitors (SAP / Microsoft / Others)
Disclaimer: AI-generated fictional commentary. Not an official corporate statement.
The solution demonstrates strong alignment between UX and process, particularly the design-first approval gate and a clear abstraction of supplier/subcontractor logistics. For mid-market retailers with customization at scale, this is compelling—especially the unification of CRM/ERP/WMS and PIM connectivity.
The trade-offs are classic: custom extensions on Odoo 17 may complicate upgrades, and modeling complex procurement steps via configurable paths must be validated for global scalability—think multi-company, multi-warehouse ATP, compliance (e.g., ESG traceability), and stronger segregation of duties. That said, the UX and agility are competitive differentiators; the question is how consistently this architecture performs with higher volumes, more SKUs, and stricter regulatory regimes.
PART 4 — Blog Footer Disclaimer
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.