Location/Region: Mocksville, NC
Industry: Manufacturing
Apps implemented: Sales, Manufacturing, Accounting, Contacts
Software Replaced: Quickbooks Pro and Microsoft Dynamics
Number of users: 4
Company size: 6
Hosting type: Odoo online
The yellow school bus is an iconic and highly identifiable image in American culture. Students ride yellow buses to and from school on a daily basis, making the safety of this transportation system of the utmost importance. Bus Safety Solutions, a company based in Mocksville, North Carolina, is dedicated to the mission of keeping children safe on their daily journeys to school.
Robert Geyer founded Bus Safety Solutions in 2012 after a child in his small hometown was tragically struck and killed by a car while exiting a stopped school bus. Robert knew the father of this child and saw firsthand the devastating ripple effect that such a horrible event can have on a tight-knit community. He vowed at that moment to do everything in his power to prevent any more senseless deaths of children. He invented an extendable stop-sign arm that can be added to all yellow school buses currently driving the roads to alert oncoming traffic that children are entering or exiting the bus. In 2016, the company’s Extended Stop Arm was patented.
Founder Robert Geyer
Today, Robert’s son Scott Geyer serves as President and Owner of Bus Safety Solutions, maintaining his father’s legacy and mission-driven business model. The company sells its extendable stop signs to school districts all across America and Canada. As the company continued to grow and its needs evolved, it demanded more robust business software to manage its operations. This is where Odoo comes in.
Braking point: Outgrowing QuickBooks and hitting a roadblock with Microsoft Dynamics
In its early days, Bus Safety Solutions used Quickbooks Pro to handle day-to-day tasks. However, by 2021, the company was beginning to outgrow the software. Scott Geyer explains that it became difficult to manage the business's numbers, scheduling, and order fulfillment using Quickbooks. Scott realized his company needed different software– specifically, something that would give the business a suite of tools and high-quality management capabilities. In other words, Scott says, they needed an ERP.
In 2022, the company decided on Microsoft Dynamics as its new software system. Unfortunately, after only six months of using the platform, Bus Safety Solutions realized that it wasn’t the right fit.
It was miserable. It was just too big, too clumsy, and not designed so that anybody could possibly use it on an easy basis. It was just miserable.
Around this time, Scott says that he happened across Odoo. After conducting a few tests and researching more about the software, he was sold. However, Scott’s father, Robert, was a harder sell. Having grown up using pen and paper and logging journal entries to keep track of business items, Robert was resistant to using anything resembling a complicated ERP system. However, Odoo appeared very intuitive and user-friendly, and ultimately, this ease of use was the final selling point that led to Bus Safety Solutions pulling the trigger and going live with Odoo 2 years ago.
How Odoo drove efficiency for Bus Safety Solutions
Scott explains that their implementation process was challenging, but that Odoo’s staff walked him and his team through everything well. Now that the company is comfortable with the software, it has been extremely beneficial on a day-to-day basis when it comes to general delegation of tasks between teams:
It makes it so much smoother. We can create different processes amongst our staff so that they know what their part is in the process. They go into the tools that is their part…everybody’s got their own module, and no one gets confused.
As owner and President of Bus Safety Solutions, Scott says that Odoo has helped him a lot in his administrative tasks. In particular, he loves the ability to set up access rights exactly as he wants them, giving access only to individuals who work with specific modules. This decreases the number of mistakes employees make in areas they’re not working in. However, since Bus Safety Solutions is also a small company, Scott works in the nitty-gritty details of the business as well, helping out with sales and accounting in addition to his administrative responsibilities.
The Odoo module Scott utilizes the most is the Sales application. Scott says the capabilities within the app have made putting in quotes and sending quotes to customers exponentially easier, and invoice creation has also become more efficient.
It's really smooth and easy to follow. The whole thing is nice.
With such an important mission at hand, Bus Safety Solutions knew it needed the right ERP to properly handle its day-to-day business operations. As the company continues to protect the lives of schoolchildren, Odoo is prepared to support Bus Safety Solutions every step of the way.
Bus Safety Solutions: Driving Success with Odoo