A 360° Change in Career

Arxi was founded in 2016 with the aim of creating innovative solutions focused on optimizing technological processes and human resources in companies. In under four years, Arxi reached Odoo Gold Partner status and is already a reference for the sector in Portugal. 

The company’s journey into the IT industry is quite unique. After several years working in an industry with no relation to new technologies, Rita Santos (CEO at Arxi) and her husband Telmo Guerra (CTO at Arxi) decided to change course and embark on a new adventure; creating a company in the tech and management sector. 

"We've always been curious about IT, and so we decided to invest in this area. We knew that the creation of this company would be the major challenge, however, also we believed that there was a need in the market, so we decided to take our chances"
says Rita Santos.

Rita and Telmo worked during the day and studied computer engineering in the evenings to develop their knowledge and efficiently take on this challenge. The first year involved a lot of hard work and learning. It was complex and full of challenges but the team managed to overcome them all successfully. 

An Open Source Alignment

In 2017, Arxi became an Odoo representative. This was an incredibly important milestone in their journey and marked the true start of Arxi’s growth. The company began with two people from different backgrounds and within two years of joining Odoo, the team grew and consisted of 10 employees which demonstrated their great work and team focus.

The decision to become an Odoo Partner was taken quite quickly. At the time Arxi had little knowledge of Odoo but when taking the decision, they found their beliefs about open source software aligned with Odoo's. Initially in the first year of partnership Arxi experienced some constraints, however in the second year they began building a stable relationship with Odoo and gained brand awareness. 

Access to an Odoo account manager to help with enhancing leads and support with the sales process has been a key benefit for Arxi within the Odoo Partnership program. Another advantage has been the platform of learning resources provided by Odoo. For Arxi, being able to focus on implementation without worrying about resources to provide to customers has been very time efficient and profitable. 

As Arxi is a start-up company with many ongoing projects, in many ways they share Odoo’s ideologies and processes. An aspect they really like about Odoo is the vision is not only corporate, it also involves a strategy of partnerships and synergies.

“Odoo intends to reach all types of companies instead of being accessible only to a niche and I totally share Fabian’s view.” - Rita Santos, CEO at Arxi.

Since their introduction, Arxi has used Odoo internally. From events organization, to surveys, email marketing, marketing automation; Odoo is used internally for almost everything. They also use the platform to manage human resources: check in and out, holidays planning and approvals. All customers projects are managed in Odoo and time spent on customer projects is registered in Odoo timesheets. The CRM app is used to manage leads and communicate with them, plan next activities and schedule meetings. In short, Odoo is not just a solution Arxi offers to clients, it also connects all the internal processes within Arxi. 

The Key to Customer Success

Studying a customer’s activity and industry has been key to Arxi’s customer success. The first activity Arxi conducts with a new customer is to understand how a customer produces their product/service and how it sells. Learning the customer’s reality is key to an efficient solution that will solve the customer’s pain points. 

“Face-to-face visit is essential, particularly in industrial sectors.” Rita Santos, CEO at Arxi

As Arxi needs to have a transversal approach to their clients’ processes, the team’s expertise lean towards generalists rather than specialists in a particular sector. 

Another key element of Arxi’s customer analysis is requesting the company’s workflows in diagram form. Often the customer does not have this workflow structured however transferring the process into a visual format provides an important management tool for the company.