Company name: Flag M Group
Country: Lebanon, MENA, Europe
Industry: Digital Marketing
Partner name: Azkatech
Odoo account manager: Samer Al Tall
Main Apps implemented: CRM, Sales, Invoicing, Inventory Accounting, Expenses Leaves/Time Off Project, Timesheet, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing, eSign, Documents, Recruitment, Studio, Helpdesk, Website, Appointment Scheduling, Purchase, Planning.
Number of Odoo Users: 100
The Star
An international branding, marketing, and communication agency obsessed with everything new and unique. Flag M Group was established in 2011. FMQ takes care of the entire workflow from branding, design, advertising, animation, and even studio production. Having over 100 employees, they believe that the vastest ideas come from the most unexpected places. Dedicated to the marketing world as an art of forming public opinion, they take your business and find the best factor to turn it into a creative impact that affects the company, clients, and the ecosystem.
The obstacles
Growing past the 100 employees and expanding internationally posed severe challenges for Feer McQueen. Some of the challenges faced were:
Managing multiple companies under the same group was a challenge due to the limited visibility of each department's load.
Lack of overview regarding the sales department pipelines and activities.
Financial and cash flow reports were a nightmare for the group as they struggled to gather reports per project, client, and department basis.
Billing on time and accurately. In many cases, some expenses were late due to the disconnected system and thus were causing unnecessary hours to recover the data and restructure.
Inaccurate reporting regarding essential activities overhead.
Those challenges were magnified when Flag M Group decided to go globally and operate offices in Lebanon, KSA, Qatar and Cyprus.
Solution
Azkatech, the Odoo Gold Partner, suggested the implementation of Odoo as they knew the company had been looking for an all-in-one management software solution. Thus, automating the processes, facilitating communication across different departments, and standardizing the processes among various offices with one integrated solution.
The arsenal
CRM
CRM was the starting point of all group activities. Allowing them to have a modern and clear view of all client information to help maintain better relations with them and keep consistent with needs and wants. They also could now work with an organized overview of leads and opportunities within the management system via a state-of-art pipeline. This system helped increase leads conversions, better sales forecasting, and enhanced department communication. Allowing them to direct their business development accordingly via streamlining under-allocated departments and de-stress sales on the over-allocated ones.
Reporting
Migrating from Excel to an advanced reporting feature with predefined and customized dashboards for better forecasts and report analysis. A job that took weeks to get ready was now done within a single click.
Accounting
Accounting was customized to meet the Lebanese accounting-specific requirements like multi-currencies and multiple rates for the same currencies as the currency tended to fluctuate. They needed a system that could manage and be flexible with the variations coming into play. All accounting operations across departments and multiple companies were centralized using Odoo with a multi-level access structure. Each country oversees their own data, with only upper management having a complete overview. Analytic accounts were configured to provide financial reports like P&L, Costs, revenue per project, per customer and department. This accounting module reduced the manual work and helped FMQ optimize its hours more effectively.
Project management & timesheet
Project management was used to track all project activities, communicate with the clients and ensure deadlines were set clearly. Moreover, the management system helped check team capacity and have statistics on the cost of each activity per project. Templates were used for different kinds of projects. Thus planning overhead was reduced to a minimum, making the team focus on more productive operations.
Timesheets are now logged per task, thus an accurate project cost without needing extra reporting work to be tabulated.
HR
Recruitment -growing internationally requires finding the right talents. Odoo multi-stage recruitment modules minimized the overhead of collecting resumes, reviewing them, qualifying and interviewing. With the help of email templates, the recruitment team could process 3x more applications in the same amount of time.
All candidate information was gathered in the chatter, thus streamlining the communication and collaboration between different parties, yet information is kept individualized for each candidate in a single place.
Leaves and attendance were a headache for a fast-growing company. Rules were applied on delays in attendance and standardized across the whole organization, which assisted in reducing favouritism. Moreover, leaves management became centralized for team time off in a single place and automated the approval cycle without guessing who was responsible for the approvals per team.
Payroll paired with the integration of leaves, time off, attendance, and project timesheet allowed to automatically calculate the compensations, deductions, and different allowances in a single click.
This process saved tens of hours each month and allowed them to minimize the time to prepare payroll, creating happier employees.
Synopsis
Diving into the rigorous world of international expansion can bring its own unique challenges based on the industry involved. Searching for a system that can be as diversified as a business paired with the ability to grow and scale with the expansion is hard. Odoo was born to grow with companies, and FMQ has grown like a fresh rose in a field.
Feer Mcqueen rocks the marketing world with Odoo