Achieving high productivity rates is critical for your business success. High productivity leads to increased efficiency of business operations, decreased costs, better customer service and improved quality of work. Thus, it can directly affect your profitability and competitive edge in the market too.
The fast-growing Odoo ERP system has been designed to help you grow your business by improving the productivity and efficiency of your processes and teams. It is a powerful business management tool with over 65 standard modules and apps, catering to a wide range of organisational needs. By nature, the majority of them will have a positive effect on your process efficiency. However, in this article, we will be looking at the top apps and modules in Odoo ERP that can help significantly boost productivity in your business.
CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the most important areas within any business. An effective CRM system in place will help improve customer engagement, increase sales and ultimately drive revenue growth.
The CRM module available on Odoo helps businesses manage their customer relationships more productively, in a highly centralised way. It offers a convenient dashboard with a clear view of all customer communications across multiple channels and lifecycles. The module allows you to effectively manage your sales pipeline by tracking new leads, controlling opportunities, monitoring customer interactions and automating communications.
You are able to assign the responsible team members, allocate tasks, leave internal notes and set action reminders within just a few mouse-clicks. A complete history of correspondence and customer calls will be stored and easily accessible to relevant persons for future reference.
The Odoo CRM module also provides advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, allowing managers to generate dynamic reports and analyse existing customer relationships, finding ways to improve customer engagement accordingly.
Project
The Project Management module on Odoo ERP system allows you to create public or private projects, assign tasks and track their progress in real-time. It provides a centralised platform for all team members to collaborate and share project-related documents on, making the communication amongst them much more efficient.
The module has a number of handy features, such as Kanban boards, Gantt charts or workflow templates to help manage projects easier and increase the productivity of your employees. Information flowing from various sources is securely stored on the system, which can then be organised using the smart filtering system. You may also generate dynamic reports from this data to track your long-term KPIs and goals.
Additionally, businesses can integrate the project module with other Odoo modules, such as timesheets and invoices, to automate project-related tasks and simplify the invoicing process. For instance, when an employee is working on a specific task, they are able to register the time it takes to complete it by simply starting a timer within the task window. It helps managers oversee all tasks effectively and calculate productivity rates, ensuring that everything is completed on time and within budget.
Communication
Odoo business management system has a number of integrated apps that improve the communication amongst your staff. The Discuss module facilitates direct messages or group conversations as well as video calls for team meetings, so there is no need to use an external app.
The Calendar module allows you to see your own and your colleagues’ availability - you can use it to schedule future meetings with both clients and employees. It is also fully integrated with your website consultation forms, meaning that the selected time slot will automatically fill-in with meeting information once a customer schedules an appointment with you.
Using the Notes module is a great way for teams to collaborate on any internal matters or issues. You may create an unlimited amount of notes and add “followers” (the relevant persons) who will be receiving notifications for the thread. Everyone is able to edit the files and log internal comments about them. This is a great space to brainstorm a list of content ideas for your upcoming blog articles, for example.
Lastly, the Survey module is not only great for client feedback or during the hiring process, but also an effective way to make internal decisions with your teams. For instance, when trying to plan on the best dates for a team Christmas party, instead of going back and forth with emails, create an internal survey with potential options.
Inventory
Inventory management involves a wide range of repetitive tasks that can be automated or otherwise made more efficient. Odoo’s Inventory module offers the right features to streamline these processes.
With this module, businesses can track stock levels in real-time and set up automated replenishment rules. It enables easy monitoring of incoming and outgoing shipments as well as stock movements between multiple warehouses and locations. Overstocked and understocked items are much easier to identify, as you receive instant notifications. Many of the order fulfilment processes can be automated with Odoo, from inputting client information to generating a shipment tracking code.
The Inventory module seamlessly integrates with other Odoo apps, such as Sales and Purchase, allowing businesses to create a complete supply chain management system. You can increase the efficiency and accuracy of your inventory management, reduce manual data entry and optimise the overall control of your stock levels.
Accounting
The Odoo Accounting module has been created to simplify and automate financial management processes within your business. It offers such features as automated bank reconciliation, custom charts of accounts, support for multiple currencies and tax structures. Generating financial reports, such as balance sheets, cash flow statements, profit and loss statements, etc. is possible in the matter of minutes.
Even the complex accounting tasks, including journal entries and asset management, can be completed much quicker using the smart automation tools of Odoo. For instance, the AI-powered expense management tool is able to scan and instantly retrieve the relevant data from a picture of a receipt, while also automatically assigning the right categories based on your past preferences.
Additionally, Odoo’s Accounting module is fully integrated with other areas of your business, including sales, purchases, inventory management, employee timesheets and so on, allowing the data to flow seamlessly between them. The module provides a complete end-to-end financial management solution, as your teams save time on manual tasks, reduce errors and gain better visibility into the company’s financial health.
Marketing
Odoo offers a suite of marketing management tools that can help you manage your creative campaigns and reach target audiences in a highly productive way. The Marketing Automaton module allows you to create automated campaigns, triggering specific actions based on selected criteria. For instance, you may set up automated cold emails to newly captured leads. You can create automated follow-up messages or server actions based on the receiver’s behaviour too.
The Email Marketing module enables your teams to effectively roll out creative email campaigns by using templates, personalisation options, scheduling functionality and more. Your emails can be assigned to specific campaigns and mailing lists, helping you track their overall performance easier. The module also produces comprehensive reports with all key metrics (open, click-through, bounce, reply rates).
Moreover, the Social Media module on Odoo is a great way to manage your company’s social media accounts in a centralised manner, all from a single dashboard. It allows you to schedule and publish posts across multiple platforms, directly from Odoo. You can also track their performance and engagement, and monitor brand reputation on an integrated dashboard.
Lastly, the SMS Marketing module helps you reach customers and prospects through personalised SMS messages. You can pre-schedule campaigns and track responses with relevant data in real-time. Overall, all of your company’s marketing activities are integrated, with the ability to create automated workflows, allowing your marketing team to focus on nurturing leads and driving engagement.
Other ways Odoo boosts productivity
Besides the specific modules and apps that Odoo offers in order to optimise your operations, there are many other ways in which it can be beneficial to the overall productivity of your employees. Here are some key examples:
An intuitive user interface - Odoo is often praised for its user-friendly and intuitive interface. The main dashboard offers a clear view of all company’s processes, the menu is always easily accessible and the different communication / filtering options are very quick to learn.
- Odoo App - Your employees can also have mobile access to their Odoo accounts through the app, which is just as user-friendly. It allows them to collaborate with their colleagues, log notes and monitor projects on the go, from anywhere in the world.
- Reminders and notifications - To help your teams manage their workload more productively, Odoo offers various features to remind or notify them of their dead-lines as well as upcoming meetings. These can be set either by themselves or by their manager.
- Smart filtering - Across all Odoo apps and modules, you are able to use the smart filtering feature to find the relevant information much quicker. You can filter and group your dashboard views based on numerous categories as well as set up a default preview that’s only relevant to you.
- Process automation - Odoo has a wealth of automation possibilities across a variety of business processes: inventory, marketing, HR, manufacturing, accounting and sales management. You can set up specific rules and workflows in order to streamline repetitive and time-consuming tasks across the board.
- Third-party integrations - In addition to the powerful standard apps offered by Odoo, there are thousands of third-party apps designed to further boost your staff’s productivity. For example, you can now integrate the powerful artificial intelligence model ChatGPT into your Odoo Discuss module using one of the freely available plug-in’s.
- Customisation opportunities - Odoo is an open-source ERP system, which makes it highly flexible and customisable by nature. Therefore, businesses are able to integrate custom solutions tailor-made to their specific needs. The customisation of Odoo modules allows businesses to achieve even greater productivity, as they create the optimal, personalised workflows for their processes.
Conclusion
To sum up, Odoo is one of the most user-friendly and flexible software on the market that also offers the best value for money. The many powerful tools and functionality of this ERP system as well as the automation possibilities ensure maximum efficiency of your processes, resulting in high productivity rates amongst your teams.
If you are looking for Odoo solution providers in the UK, we can help you! Via laurea is an official Odoo partner in the UK, helping businesses find and integrate the best solutions for their individual needs.
Ready to boost your productivity?
We can help you take maximum advantage of these powerful Odoo business management system tools!