Odoo telecom technology consulting

Solution

Business analysis 

The Itransition team began with studying the customer’s business requirements and discussing the vision of the future solution. 

We discovered that the future system should support several user roles and include the following functional modules:

• Pricing for internal sales representatives and resellers and the ability to generate quotes and order forms from the product catalog.
• Provisioning management to assist the customer’s engineers with handling service requests.
• Automated billing connected with running services and invoice and payment information (including invoice details generated by the TimelyBill system). The customer also wanted to add an online invoice payment option.
• Customer support for handling end users’ issues outside the call center.

Technology analysis

Next, we analyzed the company’s existing technology stack. The customer had already had several third-party solutions, such as ConnectWise, a telecom process management solution, and TimelyBill, a billing service, and wanted to implement the customer portal on top of them, as they believed it would reduce the development time.  

We examined the customer’s vision of the future system against the existing infrastructure and found it difficult to achieve. The implementation of a customer portal on the basis of a third-party system would complicate process management and undermine the entire system's performance and usability. Beyond that, such a system would require intermediate layers, each with its data flow and specific restrictions, and the probability of bugs and issues would be very high.

Onsite visits 

To better understand the customer’s workflows and come up with the best alternative to their proposed solution, we agreed we needed a closer look at their technology infrastructure. This is why we visited the customer on site several times.

The customer gave us access to the internal and third-party systems they used, and we performed their in-depth analysis. We identified bottlenecks in some processes, for instance, the quote generation workflow consisted of multiple steps like researching provider offers, validating user addresses, comparing rates, etc., and proved too lengthy and resource-demanding.

Based on the project requirements, our team suggested implementing a customized ERP. We turned to our internal ERP Center of Excellence to help us select a suitable platform. As a result of our joint effort, we determined that Odoo would prove the best choice, as it met around 70% of the customer’s requirements for business process optimization and automation and could be easily scaled up on demand. 

An Odoo workshop

To share our vision with the customer and let them get hands-on experience with Odoo, we conducted a two-day workshop at one of our development centers. Leveraging our long-standing expertise in Odoo consulting, we provided an all-round ERP system demonstration focusing on the modules that met the customer’s requirements, like accounting, billing, service ordering and provisioning, and customer support.  

What is more, our team configured some out-of-the-box features to fully align with the customer’s workflows and outlined the changes needed to further customize the system. For example, for the customer’s quote generation engine to collect flat rates from external services and store them in their local Flat Rates Storage database, we proposed adding external dependencies with the Centralized Vendor database (REST API) and the Flat Rates Storage (a local database, e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL).

Seeing the capabilities of the Odoo ERP in practice, the customer was impressed with its additional functionality and reasonable pricing and decided to opt for an Odoo-based system. 

Our experts outlined the future solution’s initial architecture and UX design of the key interfaces. On top of that, Itransition’s specialists elaborated the roadmap for future collaboration with the customer, including our areas of responsibility and process transparency practices. The customer approved the proposed scope for Odoo implementation, and we proceeded with the first development phase.