From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Industrial Kiln & Dryer Ignites Success with Odoo

Location/Region: Louisville, Kentucky
Industry: Industrial rotary equipment services
Apps implemented: Discuss, CRM, Sales, Documents, Project, Surveys, Inventory, Manufacturing, Data Cleaning, Dashboards, Calendar, Contacts
Software Replaced: Sage CRM
Number of users: 103 users
Company size: 160 employees
Hosting type: Odoo.sh

In the industrial sector, when critical equipment breaks down, it halts production and can result in significant financial losses for the company. For businesses reliant on rotary kilns, dryers, and ball mills, this downtime has the potential to be devastating. Industrial Kiln & Dryer Group (IKD) strives to support these companies by providing fast, expert service to ensure that rotary equipment stays up and running. 

Industrial Kiln & Dryer, based in Louisville, Kentucky, is involved in rotary equipment in a variety of ways, from building new kilns and ball mills, to helping customers refurbish existing equipment to bring it back up to code, to selling tools designed in-house that companies can use to service their own equipment. 

Ball Mill

For the unacquainted, rotary dryers are giant, slow-turning barrels that tumble materials around while hot air flows through them. This is used to dry out whatever materials are placed inside– for example, in the food industry, a company may place dry bulk foods inside of a rotary dryer in order to extend shelf life and create products such as dried fruit. Rotary kilns are high-temperature cylinders used to heat and process materials. The high level of heat changes the chemical compounds of whatever is placed in it. For example, cement production companies will place raw materials such as clay or sand inside and transform them into components of cement. Finally, ball mills are large, rotating drums filled with heavy balls. When materials, such as rocks, are placed inside, the balls crush everything inside the machine into finer, smaller components. Ball mills are useful especially in the mining or building industries. If it relates to rotary equipment, chances are IKD is up for the job. In addition to these services, the company also started IKD University, a series of on-site training courses that customers can use to learn and expand their knowledge. Here, customers get the chance to physically work with the machines during a hands-on learning experience. Above all, providing top-tier customer service is what Industrial Kiln & Dryers prides itself most on.

Through servicing rotary equipment, IKD has formed relationships with a large number of different industries, including food and beverage, textiles, cement, distilleries and breweries, and fuel. Due to the wide scope of these fields and the different ways they use the equipment, almost every job that IKD does is custom. In touching so many different industries, IKD has learned new methods of working on rotary equipment that helps the company’s service to all its customers.

Industrial Kiln & Dryer has found tremendous success in recent years, building a loyal and widespread customer base across the United States and even internationally. As the company continued to grow, its old business management system simply couldn’t keep up with the growing demands of scaling an enterprise. IKD needed software that would simplify complex workflows and be intuitive enough for a smooth adoption by its long-standing employee workforce. This is where Odoo comes in.

Leslie Neidig, Projects and Development Manager at Internetek, knows firsthand the challenges that Industrial Kiln & Dryer was facing prior to using Odoo. Internetek is a sister company of IKD, and handles all of the company’s IT needs. Leslie says that before switching to Odoo, IKD was using a combination of spreadsheets, several satellite applications, and Sage CRM. She explains that with an old-school employee base, the team was comfortable with a more manual, pen-to-paper-like approach. However, it was clear that this way of managing operations was not only inefficient but also unsustainable for the growth that lay ahead. For example, proprietary company information was stored in desktop folders on individual computers, leading to a lack of a centralized data system. Employees would have to figure out whose desk had the information they needed. This resulted in data being mishandled, getting misplaced, or lost entirely. Leslie elaborates on the roadblock that this system created:

The redundancy, the having to keep redoing the same thing over and over again, and it’s not flowing through the system, that’s a huge thing. Things [kept] falling through the cracks.

Limited functionality proved to be a dealbreaker for Industrial Kiln & Dryer with Sage CRM, specifically. Leslie explains that when the company chose Sage CRM, it was hoping to use it more like an ERP with comprehensive business capabilities. However, as a CRM platform, it lacked that wider range of functionality and fell short of the company’s expectations. While it worked to manage customer data and sales activities, it wasn’t able to integrate other aspects of IKD’s workflows, such as connecting supply-chain operations to sales orders.

[Sage CRM] couldn’t do what they needed it to do because it’s just a CRM.

Rotary Dryer

Another issue Industrial Kiln & Dryer faced with Sage CRM was getting software customizations. Leslie explains that with Sage CRM, a third-party company did customizations, and therefore, there was no accountability if something went wrong or if IKD ever faced an issue. This created a major pain point for the company, especially as a growing business whose needs were constantly growing and evolving. IKD needed software developments to be easily accomplished rather than bottlenecked.

With Sage, you had to go through a third party to get developments done, and then no one was responsible. Sage would say, ‘Oh, well, they developed it, so we don't have anything to do with it.’

I stumbled upon [Odoo], and I’m like, this is what they really need. So I was really pushing for Odoo.

In addition to Odoo, Industrial Kiln & Dryer was considering Sugar CRM and Insightly as potential business software options. Leslie explains that IKD was leaning towards Insightly, and asked if they could talk to a few happy customers to get direct testimonials about how the software worked for others to finalize their decision. To IKD’s disappointment, Insightly was unwilling or unable to provide customers with whom the company could speak. Odoo, on the other hand, gave Industrial Kiln & Dryer a variety of relevant customer references that each had positive journeys with Odoo. 

That level of customer service so quickly was the winner. The customer service is absolutely above and beyond, and that’s the same type of customer service that we deliver to our clients–   we bend over backward for our customers, and we expect that when we’re purchasing software.

With employees who were more familiar with manual processes, the user-friendliness of Odoo’s interface was also more widely appealing compared to other, more complicated software options IKD was considering. Just as important— compared to its larger competitors, Odoo offered considerably more value at a significantly lower price point.

You absolutely get way more bang for your buck from Odoo compared to SAP or Oracle.

With all of these factors in mind - the positive history with customers, the great customer service, the easy-to-use UI, and the lower price point for more value - IKD decided to choose Odoo and went live around five years ago. While transitioning to new software is never easy, the company’s actual implementation and data migration went pretty smoothly. The company even hired someone with a background in education to train the team on the new system properly. With an in-house dedication to learning the ins and outs of Odoo, along with Odoo’s continued support, IKD has found an abundance of success with the new business system.

Over the past five years, Odoo’s integration, customer service, and intuitive features have made a world of difference in Industrial Kiln & Dryer’s business operations. 

Odoo’s overall integration has made the company’s daily tasks much more efficient, especially compared to its previously disjointed and scattered system. Leslie emphasizes that the team “trusts Odoo, and they love it compared to SAGE.” Whereas with Sage CRM and spreadsheets, information frequently got lost and inputted incorrectly, Odoo clearly links related tasks together through smart buttons and auto-populated fields.

[With Odoo], you don't have to retype something ten different times in ten different applications. If you just type the customer’s address in there one time, then that address will flow into the sales order.

Leslie says that the Chatter feature is another thing that sets Odoo apart from other ERPs, highlighting that it is “so helpful in so many different ways—assigning activities, tracking what people do.” This easily accessible sidebar gives IKD’s team insight into key information regarding specific tasks, such as sales orders, allowing employees to send messages to related persons or log internal notes. A complete history of everything related to a given item is recorded within the task at hand.

As a sales-forward company, Odoo’s CRM application has been instrumental in shaping the daily workflows of IKD’s sales team. Leslie discusses the importance of Odoo’s “Activities” feature, pointing out the difference it’s made for the salespeople to be able to plan their days, assign tasks, create future activities, and set reminders to complete said activities. Additionally, management can go into the module as well and keep track of activities that their teams have completed.

It’s very helpful. Not only to help stay on track, but it helps management go in there and see what needs to be done and what hasn’t been done.

Perhaps one of the biggest takeaways that Leslie has from her continued experience with Odoo is the professional relationships she’s built along the way with Odoo’s team. She meets with the company’s Odoo consultant, Inderesh Manchanda, twice a week to keep an open channel of communication and address any questions or concerns that may come up on a day-to-day basis. This ensures that any small hiccups or issues are solved almost immediately.  Dealing with the same person on a regular schedule has personalized the process for Leslie and her team. She notes that she foresees IKD continuing to purchase service hours from Odoo to maintain this extremely crucial relationship and explains that when deciding on IKD’s new business software, working with a company that had an in-house development team was non-negotiable:

One of the requirements that we were looking for in a replacement was the development team had to be a part of the organization we were working with, so we weren't working with a middleman. And this is a huge for Odoo that we really appreciate. I can't overstate how important that is for our company.

Inderesh reiterates how important it has been for IKD’s project that he and Leslie remain in constant communication— he’s been working closely with her for around a year and a half, maintaining and optimizing IKD’s Odoo implementation. If IKD’s end users come across any concerns or see a specific workflow they’d like improved, Leslie communicates this to Inderesh. He says that the majority of what he does for Industrial Kiln & Dryer is Studio modifications– specifically, automating actions, adding fields, and adding conditions.

I have been working with Leslie for quite a bit of time. She has quite a bit of technical knowledge, so she’s good to work with. She’s familiar with all the different workflows within the company, so that’s a good thing about the SPOC. Even if she doesn’t work in that department, she has a great idea of how things work in the company. We can configure the database accordingly, which saves us time.

Leslie also maintains a strong relationship with IKD’s Odoo Customer Success Manager, Kieran Burns, who checks in with her regularly to discuss the company’s ongoing needs. Kieran reflects on what made this project in particular so successful: saying that Industrial Kiln & Dryer has been a great example of how, even for a large company, Odoo works well “out-of-the-box” without the need for a lot of customizations.

For a company of their scale, and the amount of people that are in it, it’s really impressive to me, as an account manager, how lean they run their database. There’s really not that many developments that are external to Odoo at all.

He goes on to say that the company’s database has under 1000 lines of code, which is why he feels their experience with Odoo has been so great. Other companies of IKD’s size, in his opinion, overdevelop, which leads to technical debt that, over time, accumulates into software system failure. Odoo can do so much (if not everything) with so few customizations, and IKD really shows how that’s possible at scale.

[IKD is] running many, many, many tens of millions of dollars on an Odoo database that is basically standard by all intents and purposes.

Kieran notes that many of the custom functionalities that IKD has added have actually been through Odoo’s Studio application. The company has solely worked with its Odoo BSA Inderesh rather than an outside partner for all its needs. In Kieran’s eyes, these relationships are the cornerstone of the company’s success with Odoo’s software.

Everybody tends to win with them. BSAs like working with them, Inderesh obviously likes working with them. They invest in our services and our infrastructure, and it’s paid off for them big time. It’s a good win for everybody– it’s a good Odoo win, and it's a good win for their company because we love working with them. I love working with them.

As Industrial Kiln & Dryer Group expands its leadership in the rotary equipment service industry, Odoo stands as a trusted partner, supporting both its day-to-day operations and long-term strategic goals. With a shared commitment to excellence and high-quality customer service, Odoo remains dedicated to ensuring continued success for the company and its portfolio of customers.