With 35 years of experience, MU Store is one of the longest-standing and most trusted brands in the Maldives' wholesale and trading industry. Starting with a single wholesale shop in the Malé Wholesale Bazaar area with just two staff members, MU Store now operates in three outlets and a supermarket, stocking a large variety of consumer goods in ten warehouses across the country.
Why Odoo?
Development Cost
Having used QuickBooks for ten years to oversee finances, POS and other standalone systems for managing all the operations, the team soon found the investment too high for regular system maintenance and integration.
In 2022, Fazal, the Director of Finance and Operations, was looking for a new solution. A recommendation from a fellow user led him to an all-in-one Odoo ERP software, which he ultimately chose for its full range of business management features and competitive price.
Data Centralization
Having their finance, sales, and inventory data scattered across multiple systems made it difficult for MU Store to effectively manage inventory, sale orders, deliveries, especially to faraway islands.
With Odoo, MU Store can now manage all core operations, as well as human resources and marketing initiatives, on the same database, where data is synchronized in real-time. Scroll on for all the benefits Odoo has brought to MU Store:
The Odoo Solution
1. Full Business Visibility
Since implementing Odoo, the managers at MU Store now oversee the entire sales cycle, from sales order (SO) creation to product delivery on the Sales app. "Sales efficiency at MU Store has been greatly improved ever since we started using Odoo," says Fazal. The sales management system's intuitive interface design enables managers to view all retail and wholesale opportunities, their respective teams and the sales revenue of each order in a single window.
A few clicks away is the Odoo Accounting app, where managers can gain an overview of business performance through reports synchronized with real-time data from the Sales app for outstanding credit control.
2. Inventory Data Accuracy
MU Store utilized the Odoo Inventory app to manage stock in all ten warehouses and delivery to its three outlets.
Odoo's Inventory Overview consolidates all receipts, POS, delivery, and manufacturing orders, allowing the team to validate pending orders within just a few clicks. In the same app, Fazal can also monitor the stock level and variety of each warehouse within the app, preventing overstocking to reduce operational cost and making the most efficient reordering and stock-moving decisions.
3. System Scalability & User-Friendliness
"I would definitely recommend Odoo to all trading and retail businesses. User-friendliness is the ERP's biggest strength."
Getting used to a new system is surely no easy task. Thanks to Odoo's intuitive user interface (UI) design and flexible architecture, the MU Store team describes their learning curve during the transformation as "easy."
With access to Odoo's open-source code, retailers and wholesalers can seamlessly scale their businesses by utilizing more Odoo apps, while further enhancing the software system with custom modules and APIs developed by their implementation partner, EUSOL.
Having centralized its sales, finance, and inventory management on Odoo, Fazal is ready to take digital transformation to the next step by consolidating human resources management on Odoo, using the Payroll, Attendance and Time Off apps. The best thing yet? No extra cost required!
