Breakwood Enterprises: The Chemistry of Growth with Odoo Integration

Chromatography is a lab technique used to separate a substance into its components, and is used in many different industries including pharmaceutical, food and agriculture, earth science, and biotechnology. Given that it’s a process that needs to be carried out in an exact manner, chromatography requires specifically and carefully designed instruments. Breakwood Enterprises, based in Solon, Ohio, manufactures these products for all of the industries that use chromatography in their field.

A trusted provider of chromatography products and services, Breakwood Enterprises has built its reputation on delivering top-tier solutions for labs. Its origins date back to 2003 when Jeff Woodliff was working at a company called PerkinElmer Life Sciences, and was offered the chance to purchase a section of the business and its related products. Jeff took this unique opportunity and created Breakwood Enterprises. Today, Breakwood sells injection-molded chromatography lab supplies and has even expanded its operations to include chromatography expertise, methods, and assay development, among other services. 

As the company continues to grow and expand its operations, it needed a more automated and integrated way to manage the business. It was also looking for a software that not only would work well today, but for many years to come. Odoo happened to be the perfect fit.

Andrew Dougherty, Managing Director at Breakwood Enterprises, got involved with the company in 2019. At this time, the business was still using Excel spreadsheets and files to organize and track information. This old way of doing things led to a lot of time spent entering data and manually carrying out workflows, as well as creating a more error-prone environment. It became clear to Andrew and other management over the next few years that Breakwood needed a more established, software-based system in order to effectively manage its day-to-day operations.

Breakwood Enterprises began exploring software options at the beginning of this year, looking into Odoo and Netsuite, amongst others. Andrew explains that compared to its competitors, Odoo was the most reasonably priced option for the amount of functionality and flexibility it had. For this reason, the company made the decision to go with Odoo. Andrew explains that since Breakwood had been using spreadsheets to manage data, it pretty much started from scratch with Odoo. The company uploaded all of its information, creating vendor and customer contacts within the system. While their implementation wasn’t without its hiccups, Breakwood’s transition was ultimately a success, with the company going live with Odoo in March of 2024.

So far, one of the biggest benefits Odoo has provided the company is the automation of daily processes that used to have to be completed manually, which wasted time and resulted in more easily made mistakes. Breakwood’s Operations Director Tom Desko explains how basic functions such as inputting new customer or vendor information have been made more efficient with Odoo’s “Duplicate” feature in the Contacts module. Since a lot of information remains the same across contacts, being able to duplicate the pages and simply switch out relevant information has saved the company valuable time. Andrew adds on how Breakwood’s typical workflow has also been automated along every step of the process:

Now with Odoo, you’ve got products in the database, you can easily add those products to a quotation. If the customer approves the quotation, you push a button… and all those purchase orders are created automatically, which is a huge savings from what we were doing before.

Another daily workflow that has been simplified by Odoo is blanket orders. In the lab industry, Tom explains that Breakwood Enterprises frequently has repeat customers who need to restock equipment on a cyclical schedule for their chromatography needs. He notes how easy Odoo makes it to enter these types of refill orders due to the history it keeps of customers' previous purchases. 

The ability to track what you’re doing in an online, web-based, cloud-based system like Odoo– it's a huge advantage.

An Odoo feature that Andrew and Tom find particularly helpful both for their employees and themselves in managerial roles is Chatter. Not only can employees log internal notes and communicate with a customer directly from the database, but a related history of any given task is accessible on the side of the page, listing relevant dates of completed activities or correspondences. This allows Andrew and Tom to quickly and easily view whether they’ve received acknowledgment from a customer, for example, or track progress made on an item.

Going into Odoo and looking at the Chatter, that is a fabulous feature, because you can see all of the communications in and out on the topic. 

The integration that Odoo offers Breakwood Enterprises, even just eight months in, has already made a huge difference for the company. Tom speaks on how helpful it has been to have everything tied together, such as sales orders, purchase orders, invoices, and dropships. Linking related tasks through Smart Buttons has connected workflows in an intuitive manner, making it easier to navigate through the business’ day-to-day processes. 

We were driven towards the integrated functionality. And, of course, that’s all built on one database’s information, which is very important.

While Breakwood is still early in its journey with Odoo, the company is excited about its future with the software and the capabilities Odoo offers. One important business function that Breakwood is eager to move over to Odoo shortly is its company website. Currently, its website is on Wordpress– however, Andrew explains that the website is purely informational, as in, it is not used for sales of their products. If they wanted to add eCommerce capabilities through Wordpress, it would require purchasing and adding on a third-party platform. Andrew says that Breakwood isn’t interested in going this route– instead, the company’s goal is to eventually use Odoo’s Website module so that the eCommerce side of the business is seamlessly integrated with the rest of their database and related workflows. 

Another important application that Breakwood is looking forward to utilizing soon is Odoo’s Manufacturing module. Andrew explains that the company’s manufacturing process is a core aspect of the business. As it stands, it is pretty light and easily manageable outside of an ERP, but they chose Odoo with intentions to transfer manufacturing into Odoo’s system eventually. He says that while they are still settling into using the software for their more basic workflows, they chose Odoo ultimately knowing it would be the best fit for their manufacturing needs. 

We’re just scratching the surface of what Odoo can do for us.

Despite being early in its Odoo journey, Breakwood has already felt the positive impact that the software has had on its daily operations. From increased efficiency through automation to insight into customer relations and data, Odoo has given the company the strong foundation to continue growing within the chromatography supply manufacturing industry. As Breakwood Enterprises looks ahead to what else it can accomplish within the ERP software, Odoo is thrilled to be along for the ride.