How Hibou Leverages Open Source to Streamline Businesses

Headquarters: United States (Seattle, Washington)
Number of Employees: 5

Number of Implementations: 15-20

Partnership Year: 2014

Services Offered: Implementations; Extra Integrations; Migrations; Support Services; Customizations; Business and Process Consulting; Product Support; Hosting

The Perfect Match

Nothing exemplifies the “two heads are better than one” motto better than the founders of Hibou. Jared Kipe was a Director of Technology at an Inc. 5000 e-commerce company and has extensive experience as a developer and consultant. Kaylie Kipe was a Director of Marketing at an Inc. 5000 e-commerce company with a background in SaaS marketing and customer service. Jared and Kaylie’s skills came together and coalesced perfectly to make Hibou, a company dedicated to making sure businesses have what they need to run perfectly. Now, as part of Hibou, Kaylie and Jared wear many hats: Jared focuses on technical aspects and serves as a developer, project manager, and systems architect, while Kaylie focuses on project management, support, and functional trainings.

A couple of years before partnering with Odoo, Jared and Kaylie considered Odoo for a project but the client ultimately went a different route. After circling back to Odoo to implement CRM for the client a few years later, they started Hibou. Hibou was initially founded as a company for Odoo development and integrations and since then they have released a lot of open source software. They love Odoo as an open-source solution, and its ability to be customized to suit a variety of specific use cases is a major selling point for them. Hibou has helped its clients migrate away from other solutions like Quickbooks - programs which generally are modest in price but offer less in terms of functionality, customizability, and support. Kaylie says, “As far as ERPs go, we only work with Odoo.”

Hibou became an Odoo Partner to gain access to the enterprise code base to use and customize for both clients and Hibou itself. According to Kaylie “We believe in open source, we contribute back to the open source community. It’s a strong platform. When people discuss projects with me, no matter what type of project it is,  my mind immediately goes to how it can be implemented in Odoo.”

Odoo • A picture with a caption

A powerhouse combination of development, server management, marketing, project management and business streamlining.


Customization is Key

Hibou now offers a wide array of services - customizations, business and process consulting, product support, and - more recently - hosting. Once clients choose to partner with Hibou, Kaylie and Jared ensure their clients’ needs are met, by offering every service at their disposal. Clients know they have one company they can go to on a day-to-day basis for all their needs, instead of having to get those services piecemeal elsewhere. Hibou’s main source of pride is their high attention to detail combined with technical ability. This is best demonstrated by the many documentation resources they’ve developed, which go a long way to showing the value they can bring to any project.

One of Hibou’s clients is in the manufacturing industry. Their main products are made-to-order, every piece that they ship out is a customized product created from a long list of options the buyer can choose - options beyond just color and size. The customers are selecting 15-20 attributes for an item, and each one is made to order. When Hibou went into the project, this client lacked a clear way to manage the options and the resulting product that need to be produced from start to finish. With the upgrade to Odoo v12, Hibou used the new product configurator to configure the different options for the client which ultimately has an impact on the whole manufacturing process itself. The client has very different processes for older orders versus an order that was placed after their Odoo deployment. Says Kaylie “The client has been very happy with what they’ve seen so far, and it’s brought them so much closer to achieving their long-term goals.”

Another manufacturing client of theirs required a lot of customization. “Every manufacturing client has some customization, and those are always interesting to us.” Kaylie explains. This client wanted to have serial numbers to track from start to end, but the product they are consuming and the process they are outputting have the same serial number. Hibou’s solution was not to use work orders, and instead implement some of what work orders do but all within a standard manufacturing order. Through this solution, they were able to keep track of various documents that would be produced during manufacturing, with each serial number maintaining continuity throughout the process and having an associated tracking document.

"We believe in open source, we contribute back to the open source community. It’s a strong platform. When people discuss projects with me, no matter what type of project it is, my mind immediately goes to how it can be implemented in Odoo."

Kaylie Kipe, VP of Hibou

        

An Open Source Powerhouse

Hibou loves that Odoo is an open source platform, and they are very dedicated to it. “The ability to submit support tickets and know there are people on the other end who understand how the software works is incredible.” From a partner perspective, the Account Management side of Odoo has really ramped up, “There is a real person that I see face to face, I can escalate things to them, and they get me in touch with the right people.”

“We’ve given five talks at Odoo Experience about customization at one point or another.” says Kaylie. Hibou is incredibly serious about their open source work. They created modifications to the maintenance app, so that people can keep track of usage - who had it for how long, to schedule automatically based on how long something was in use, and scheduling maintenance based on mileage.  They’ve also made modules for shipping management - such as thermal label integrations for printing, USB scales to measure weights, and a robust Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) app.

Kaylie and Jared love that at Hibou there is always something new to do, a new puzzle to figure out. Every implementation is different and it’s exciting to learn from each one. “We like solving problems. There’s nothing better than having a complex problem, and then being able to get on a call and show them from start to finish how you are making their idea a reality.” Considering their immaculate retention rate, it seems like they’ll be turning ideas to reality for a long time.



About Hibou

Hibou is a powerhouse combination of development, server management, marketing, project management and business streamlining.

Their goal is to make your business run like a dream. To anticipate obstacles and solve them before you knew they existed while sprinkling a bit of happiness into everyday operations. 


Hibou has a lot of open source modules available to the community! Here’s a breakdown of the number of open source modules available per-version:
v10: 37
v11: 85
v12: 25

They also have 97 pages of public​ ​Odoo documentation available on their site​, with more being added all the time!

Learn more at www.hibou.io

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