The Odoo ERP software enables seamless data collection from multiple departments within your company, including sales, finance, and warehouse, consolidating it in a single, centralized database.
With built-in data analytics and reporting capabilities, you can make sense of all the gathered data, streamlining the decision-making within your company and generating impactful business insights.
In this article, experts from Itransition, an Odoo implementation partner with a 10+ year track record, reveal seven use cases for Odoo data analytics.
1. Inventory analytics
Both inventory shortage and overstocking are detrimental to your business. Stockouts can cause supply chain disruptions and lower turnover, resulting in lost sales and customer dissatisfaction. Excessive inventory, in turn, can raise storage costs dramatically and limit business liquidity. Tracking stock volumes and maintaining an optimal inventory level is critical to avoid these issues.
Odoo’s reporting and analytics capabilities enable companies to easily track the availability of certain inventory items across their warehouses, including allocated and on-hand stock.
You can also track items only expected to arrive in your warehouse – Odoo can provide accurate quantities based on confirmed purchase orders. With all this information at your fingertips, you can monitor your inventory levels and ensure that the correct number of items is available at the right time.
Additionally, you can use Odoo to anticipate product demand for the coming period to maintain an optimal stock level. For example, you can enable the Odoo ERP system to generate accurate forecasts automatically for hundreds or even thousands of SKUs based on your historical sales data, current inventory levels, and other factors.
2. Manufacturing analytics
With Odoo’s native data analytics functionality, companies operating in the manufacturing market can generate valuable insights for optimizing production workflows.
For instance, Odoo can be used to automatically calculate production order costs for different types of products based on raw material costs, labor, and other expenses (labor costs can also be defined automatically based on hourly rates from Odoo’s Employees app). You can use this information to identify redundant and cost-prohibitive products and discontinue their production.
Odoo’s built-in tools can also help you oversee the overall health of your equipment, as you can track metrics such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and mean time between failures (MTBF). Based on this information, you can generate more accurate equipment maintenance schedules and distribute load among work centers more efficiently, maximizing production efficiency.
3. Accounting analytics
Odoo’s reporting and analytics capabilities can also help you maintain visibility into your financial health. For example, you can easily track your company’s balance sheet, get an overview of a company’s profit and loss, and analyze various financial metrics such as gross profit per month or annual ROI.
You can also generate cash flow forecasts to foresee inflows and outflows in the coming months, which can improve your financial planning. If a forecast indicates an upcoming cash shortage shortly, you can take specific measures, such as cutting out unnecessary expenses or allocating a budget buffer.
4. Marketing analytics
To ensure your marketing investments pay off, you can leverage Odoo’s data reporting and analytics tools to optimize your company’s marketing efforts. Specifically, you can use pre-built marketing dashboards provided by Odoo to track the effectiveness of email, SMS, and social media campaigns by checking KPIs such as open rates, number of obtained leads, or generated revenue.
This way, you can understand which lead generation channels are performing better than others and which marketing tactics are more promising, and later use this knowledge to enhance your overall marketing strategy.
5. Sales analytics
Among other things, Odoo can help you delve deeper into the current state of sales in your company and generate insights that can help maximize sales performance. You can track KPIs such as sales by product to understand which product items are most demanded among customers and tailor your sales strategies accordingly.
You can also track sales by teams and even individual reps to identify top performers, or vice versa, underperformers that do not contribute to your business success. Odoo also can enable you to generate sales predictions for weeks or months ahead, so that you can forecast your company’s revenue more accurately.
6. Ecommerce analytics
If you are using Odoo to manage your ecommerce activities, you can also leverage Odoos’ built-in tools to track site performance. With a few clicks, you can define the exact volume of orders made on your site over a certain period, determine the number of abandoned carts, and identify the best-selling products and product categories.
You can also get to know your site’s visitors better by analyzing customer demographics, including gender, age, and location. You can use all this information to optimize your site for better conversions (improve user experience design, add relevant CTAs, tailor content to different customer groups, etc.).
7. Fleet analytics
Last but not least, Odoo’s built-in reporting and analytics tools can help you improve fleet management. For example, you can use Odoo’s analytics functionality to identify all the costs associated with a particular vehicle, calculate its return on investment, and decide to replace it with another vehicle if it does not meet your financial expectations.
You can also use Odoo’s analytics tools to identify unsafe driving behaviors. Then, you can implement different strategies to improve it (offer reward programs, provide training, etc.), so you can reduce the risk of road accidents.
Final thoughts
Odoo ERP applications accumulate a wide range of data which you can analyze to fuel your decision-making processes. Odoo’s data reporting and analysis tools can help you spotlight areas for improvement across marketing, manufacturing, sales, and other business activities, optimizing your company’s performance and improving its bottom line.
If you aim to maximize the return on your ERP investment and utilize Odoo’s analytics capabilities to the fullest, consider a partner-led Odoo implementation. A robust implementation partner will help conceptualize the Odoo solution, customize functional modules, and integrate all necessary data sources, to tailor Odoo to your unique business requirements.
