How DJAR digitised its company with Odoo!

Ever had a jar from DJAR? If you haven’t, you’re really missing out! DJAR offers a B2B lunch service, consisting of healthy meals in a glass jar. Just give the jar a good shake, and a healthy lunch is revealed and ready to be served! 🥗 While the lunch service is their core business, DJAR also offers other food options, such as apéro boxes, and caters events. Ain’t no party like a DJAR party! Especially since we’ve thrown some Odoo ERP in the mix 😎

DJAR was founded by Danielle and Alison. In the past few years, they have been busy perfecting the DJAR formula and experimenting with new food concepts. Yes, these two really want to reach for the stars! And nothing is stopping them! Well, except… their old tech stack was kind of a spoilsport 😟

One of their biggest issues was spending too much time on simple day-to-day tasks, while those could be (semi-)automated. What a waste of time! DJAR needed a system that helped them do the heavy lifting - allowing them to focus on what really matters: growing their business. 

Another problem Danielle and Alison had was that their data was shattered between different applications… or wasn’t even digitised at all, like their inventory 😱 While it was still somewhat feasible to work with at the moment, if DJAR kept growing, it would become a recipe for disaster quickly. 

Our approach

To kick things off, we started with a growth workshop to determine and get aligned on the high-level and long-term goals of DJAR. Next to that, we also identified their biggest challenges and inefficiencies during this workshop. 

After mapping out their current business processes and defining the roadmap for the project, it was time to start building! 👷 We needed to develop a system that would help them solve following challenges:

1 Automate their workflow
2 Collect all data in the same place
3 Digitise their inventory
4 Allow better communication between different departments and employees

Odoo to the rescue! 

We chose to work with an Odoo environment and went with a pretty standard setup, so we wouldn’t need any additional development. We added different modules, such as Sales, CRM, Purchasing, Inventory, Invoicing, Manufacturing and Studio. The great thing about Odoo is that all those modules can ‘talk’ to each other. This enables you to automate a lot of stuff, which saves you tons of time!

We iterated fastly by implementing a solution, testing it thoroughly and reworking it based on the feedback ⚡ By doing so, we were able to create a solution that was specifically tailored to the needs of DJAR.

During the project, we started training DJAR’s key users and kept supporting and coaching them, until they were completely familiar with Odoo. By doing this, we ensured the full potential of Odoo and our work was unlocked!

DJAR’s biggest wins 💪

Today, a lot has already changed at DJAR. We feel these are the biggest accomplishments: 

• An improved workflow.  From now on, Danielle and Alison can track all opportunities in their funnel and create quotes with just one click! If the customer signs the offer, Odoo converts that quote into a sales order, and at the same time creates a manufacturing order for the kitchen- and even the delivery order for the couriers. It’s all automated, baby!

• Automation in their production planning and process. By configuring all the bills of materials and ingredients for their Signature Djars and other delicious products, we were able to automatically create manufacturing orders that instructs their kitchen what they need to prepare for incoming orders, and in what timeframe. Next to that, delivery orders are also automatically generated for their couriers! They can even plan the most efficient route base, thanks to a native Google Maps integration.

• Digitisation of their inventory and purchasing flow. Danielle and Alison didn’t have any structured inventory management system, but were well aware that not having an overview of their inventory would become a critical issue in the near future. So, they decided to tackle this now! Being able to know what you have in stock is critical for any business. Since this is all on the same platform, Odoo can suggest to them what needs to be purchased based on stock levels and future orders, taking into account vendor lead times.

• Communication between employees. More often than not, Alison and her kitchen crew have questions about specific orders. Odoo allows them to communicate with colleagues through notes where they tag them. Their team can communicate about sales orders, manufacturing orders, CRM opportunities, and much more. The tagged person receives a chat message immediately and can go straight to the right order from there! How neat is that? 😎

• A future proof system that will grow with them. The whole goal of this project was not only to automate tasks or increase efficiency, but also to create a strong foundation to build upon.

What’s next? 👀

As I said at the beginning of this blogpost, DJAR needed a foundation to build upon. So this is only the beginning! Our next step is building a webshop on the Odoo platform, that will be able to handle all online orders. This way, Danielle and Alison can focus on big deals, events and other business initiatives. This webshop will be completely integrated with their current Odoo database, so no data will be lost.

And, last but not least, DJAR founders Danielle and Alison are delighted with our collaboration too! "We asked Dear Digital to help with the implementation of an Odoo environment and the automation of our business. It helped us so much and saves us tons of time. We are very satisfied with the result. Our feedback was always taken into account and everything was tailored to our specific needs. On top of that,, Julien (Odoo lead at Dear Digital) has a keen eye for detail and made us feel like our needs were always put first.”