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Smooth Operations: Hotmix Paves the Way with Odoo's Streamlined Solutions

Location/Region: Louisville, KY
Industry: Asphalt service and parts
Apps implemented: Discuss, CRM, Sales, Purchase, Inventory, Manufacturing, Quality, Calendar, Contacts
Software Replaced: Sage CRM
Number of users: 72
Hosting type: Odoo.sh


Asphalt is an important, versatile material critical to many projects in the construction and paving industry. In order to keep operations running smoothly, it is critical that an asphalt plant’s equipment is functioning at peak performance. Hotmix Parts & Services, based in Lousiville, Kentucky, works closely with asphalt plants, providing replacement parts and supporting their operational needs. This includes tune-ups to equipment, installations, and alignments, which are crucial to keeping a plant up and running and avoiding downtime. For over 30 years, Hotmix has been a leader in the asphalt industry, providing unparalleled service and expert knowledge to its customers. 


Hotmix’s customer base has grown in recent years, with over 14,000 companies using its services within the asphalt industry. With this increasing success, the company has turned its attention to finding the right business software to consolidate its information and streamline workflows. Odoo, it turns out, was the right choice.

The bumpy road before Odoo

Leslie Neidig, Projects and Development Manager at Internetek, knows firsthand the challenges that Hotmix Parts & Services faced before using Odoo. Internetek is a sister company of Hotmix and handles all of the company’s IT needs. She says that before switching to Odoo, Hotmix used a combination of spreadsheets, several satellite applications, and Sage. 

When discussing the challenges that Hotmix faced prior to Odoo, Leslie explains that the company’s previous system caused three main roadblocks. Firstly, there was no centralized system for keeping track of data. Not only was information spread across several platforms, but some critical information wasn’t written down at all. Leslie says that some of Hotmix’s salespeople have been with the company since its inception, and these individuals are extremely knowledgeable, especially regarding specific, long-time customers. However, as some of these salespeople begin to retire, Leslie says that the company realized it needed to record valuable information in one central database so that it would be accessible to future hires.

Secondly, data that was stored in Sage was not stored intuitively. When anyone needed to export information, Sage’s platform made the process extremely cumbersome, resulting in difficult-to-read data:


"The way that data was stored in Sage…when I downloaded it, the format was so messed up that when I uploaded it, it just jumbled together. They would look like separate notes in Sage, but all the data was clumped in one cell."

Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix

A task as simple as figuring out how many customers were in the database proved to be cumbersome with Sage. What should have only taken one click of a filter required a painstaking manual process that wasted a frustrating amount of time:

"In Sage, if I wanted to know how many customers were in there…I would have to do a count of how many rows there are in the table to figure out how many we have."

Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix

Thirdly, being a parts and services company, knowing the ins and outs of customers’ equipment is a top priority. Leslie explains that Sage didn’t have a robust and intuitive enough system to track and manage equipment. She says that the asphalt equipment that Hotmix works with is extremely complex and customized, meaning a lot of specific information needs to be recorded for each and every individual piece. This includes sizing, make, model, current and previous vendors, tons per hour, and tons per year, among other details. This data was also not stored in consistent, easy-to-locate areas and instead was spread out across the system. Equipment information could be in any number of different locations, which meant wasted time simply trying to locate data.


"We completely ignored Sage when it came to equipment. I tried to pull the equipment from Sage, but [the salespeople] hated it so much."

 Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix


For Hotmix’s day-to-day requirements, Sage's limitations and disjointed software proved unsustainable for the company’s continuing growth. With originating salespeople beginning to retire, the company felt a time crunch to find an alternative that could reliably store valuable data and eliminate the variety of applications it was using. Hotmix wanted one, all-encompassing software to both address its concerns and propel the company forward into its next era of growth. With Leslie’s help, the company began exploring alternative options that would better suit its needs.

After thorough research, Leslie felt confident that Odoo’s user-friendly interface, integrated nature, and accessible price point would be the right fit for Hotmix. With these requirements in mind, Hotmix decided to go with Odoo and went live with the software in 2020. 

Hotmix finds its groove with Odoo

Leslie reflects on Hotmix’s implementation process with Odoo, noting that it was a “very easy” transition. With employees that have been with the company for 30+ years, changing to an unfamiliar software was a concern. However, over the past four years, Hotmix’s team has adapted to Odoo well:

"The new salespeople, the younger generation, picked it up right away, and they are really into it. They learned it quickly, they like to use it. Even the older people are getting used to it."

  Leslie Neidig


 


Since using Odoo, Leslie says that Hotmix’s data management has been night and day compared to its experience with Sage. Whereas information such as notes was stored in multiple, unintuitive locations in Sage, Odoo has made accessing relevant data much easier and more efficient. Hotmix’s sales team, in particular, finds Odoo’s Chatter function to be a huge benefit for customer management:

"The way that the notes are laid out on Chatter is so much more helpful than the way it was in Sage. You don't have to click on three different locations to see the different sites of notes. If it's a to-do, if it's a log note, if it's an activity note, it’s right there in the same spot…That is, to me, the best thing that’s helped them out."

Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix

With Sage, reporting capabilities were essentially nonexistent. Leslie discusses how now, the user-friendliness of Odoo’s reporting has made accessing information way faster, especially for some of the longer-standing employees who used to rely on her to access reports:

“Being able to extract the data that we need to do the reporting that we need has been so powerful. And anybody can do it; they don’t need to come to me to try to pull the data. They can just grab it themselves.”

Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix

One of Hotmix’s biggest pain points with Sage was a disjointed and unsophisticated equipment tracking system. As a service and parts company, this significantly impacted the efficiency of day-to-day operations. Leslie says that in Odoo, Hotmix’s team can easily manage equipment on the customer’s page, seeing which specific pieces are linked to which customers. This transparency and intuitive organization are a huge improvement from Sage.

“It’s been very helpful having [equipment] on three different tabs and having it grouped by the specific types of equipment. It’s been a much, much, much better solution than what we had with Sage. Sage could not accomplish this.”

Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix

Other simple but impactful organizational features, such as Odoo’s filters and tags, have helped Hotmix and its team categorize data into groups and highlight important information that can’t be missed. Leslie discusses how the company uses these capabilities within its daily workflows:


“The color coding on the tags is very helpful for them to identify a contact. One of our tags reads ‘Critical notes’... so something doesn’t get lost.”

Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix

Overall, the integration and connectedness of Odoo’s database have changed how Hotmix conducts day-to-day operations. The impact of consolidating information that used to exist on multiple different platforms in difficult-to-locate areas is now easily accessible in one user-friendly place. Leslie says that Odoo’s all-in-one, comprehensive software has made a tangible impact on the company’s success:


“Our sales have increased, and I think it has a lot to do with not having to redo things over and over and over again because we’ve gotten rid of, I want to say, five standalone applications since we switched to Odoo.”

Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix

The power of partnership: Hotmix’s Odoo transformation

Perhaps one of Leslie's biggest takeaways from her continued experience with Odoo is the professional relationships she’s built along the way with Odoo’s team. She meets with Hotmix’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 explains that when deciding on Hotmix’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.”

Leslie Neidig
Point of Contact for Hotmix

Inderesh seconds how important it has been for Hotmix’s project that he and Leslie remain in constant communication. If Hotmix’s end users encounter 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 the company 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.”

Inderesh Manchanda
Business Analyst at Odoo

Leslie also maintains a strong relationship with Hotmix’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 Hotmix Parts & Services 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 number 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.”

Kieran Burns
Customer Success Manager at Odoo

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.”

Kieran Burns
Customer Success Manager at Odoo

As Hotmix expands its leadership within the asphalt parts and services industry, Odoo stands as a trusted partner, supporting both its day-to-day operations and long-term growth 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.

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