JP Morris: agricultural packaging on Odoo CE
Eighteen months from spreadsheets to one system covering accounts, stock, warehouse picking and quality control - built phase by phase, at the pace the business could absorb.
JP Morris is an agricultural packaging business. Its operations ran on Excel: orders, stock, picking and quality records held in spreadsheets and in people's heads, each part of the business keeping its own version of what was true.
The requirement was not a replacement for the spreadsheets. It was a single system the business could run from, with quality control built into the process rather than recorded alongside it - and an implementation that would not stop the business while it happened.
Open Digital delivered the analysis, configuration and development on Odoo Community Edition, phase by phase over eighteen months.
After doing our research we definitely thought that Odoo would be the perfect choice for us - one system at the centre of all data that you can just run from.
Hannah Joynson, Managing Director
The work
The system covers accounts, stock, warehouse picking and quality control on one platform. Quality control is the part that changed the operation rather than just recording it: QC checks run through the system, and the next stage of a process cannot begin until the checks for the previous one are complete. Compliance stopped being a parallel paper exercise and became the thing that gates the work.
Warehouse operations were given their own interface rather than the full ERP. Staff work on a phone or tablet: scan a lot number, choose the source location, confirm the move. Picking shows the demands for an order with the lots that satisfy them, their locations, weights and expiry dates, and a package is assigned and validated in a few taps. Where judgement is required - an expired lot that needs manual confirmation - the interface refuses to validate and hands the user back to Odoo, which is exactly where that decision belongs.
The sequencing was deliberate. Each phase went live, was absorbed, and built the confidence for the next, rather than the whole system arriving at once.
Given its open source nature, given you can customise everything, most of our QC checks are done via the system - the next part of the process cannot be started until those quality checks have been completed.
Hannah Joynson, Managing Director
The outcome
Operational efficiency improved, but the change the Managing Director describes is a change in understanding: implementing the system forced the business to examine every process and justify it. The ambition now is fully paperless, online-integrated operations - a direction the platform supports rather than one it has to be rebuilt for.
The system is Odoo Community Edition. There are no licence fees, the customisations belong to the business, and it can be developed further as the operation changes.
It's made me stop and look at the business as a whole - it forces you to really get into the finer detail of every single process and ask: why are we doing that?
Hannah Joynson, Managing Director
Her advice to anyone starting the same journey was about restraint rather than technology: don't run before you can walk, take the time, get the basics right first.