Retail & wholesale

One Odoo platform: from POS to field-service tablet.

When their incumbent ERP reached end of life, this 60-year Belgian electrical retailer moved counter sales, inventory, accounting and on-the-road service onto one Odoo backbone with the Dynapps Retail Module.

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Elektro Van Assche store

Sector

Retail. Electrical appliances and home installation

Footprint

1 store, Zingem (Kruisem), Belgium · 2,000 m² shop floor

Scale

30 specialised employees; appliances, telephony, multimedia, boilers, heating

Dynapps partner

Since 2021.

Backing

Family-owned (Van Assche family), 60+ years.

How it started

Before Dynapps stepped in.

By 2021, Elektro Van Assche, a 60-year family-owned electrical retailer in Zingem, near Kruisem in East Flanders, was running its back office on an aging ERP that had reached end of life. Conny Van Assche, owner and managing director, could see the choice approaching: with the incumbent system going out of support, the shop's 30 staff and its on-the-road service technicians were operating on borrowed time. The product mix (large and small appliances, telephony and multimedia next to electric boilers and heating systems) meant the next ERP had to handle both fast counter sales and scheduled installation work, on the same ledger.

Two colleagues reviewing a laptop in a meeting room

The challenge

Where the cracks showed.

The friction wasn’t catastrophic. It was the kind that compounds quietly over years. Conny, looking back from the new system: “It’s actually a smoother flow, more efficient than how we used to work.” Three specific places that friction lived:

  • At the counter

    Many products are small enough that customers expect to pick them up, pay, and leave inside a couple of minutes. When checkout depends on a back office that doesn't speak fluently to the till, every transaction borrows time from the next customer in the queue.

  • The technician on the doorstep

    Before the Odoo rollout, technicians went out without a tablet. Time logged on paper, accessories noted by hand, signatures on duplicate forms, then transcribed back at the office, then forwarded to accounting. Each handoff was a place where a step got lost or a number got re-keyed.

  • On the website

    Product data lived in Niwzi (the PIM the trade runs on), inventory and sales lived in the incumbent ERP, and the website pulled from a third place. Keeping the three in lockstep was a small but constant tax: a customer turned up for an item the site said was in stock, or stayed away from one that was.

The turn

Why Elektro Van Assche chose Odoo and the Dynapps Retail Module.

The incumbent ERP reached end of life, and staying with the existing system was no longer available. The question wasn't which new ERP would be best; it was whether to leave the old one at all, and who could help Elektro Van Assche land somewhere stable. Two paths on the table:

  • 01

    Stay on the legacy system

    Push the end-of-life date out as far as possible, patch what broke, accept the slow drift. Ruled out: the trajectory was a question of when, not if, and the till and the road were both straining the system already.

  • 02

    Move to Odoo with Dynapps

    Conny's team had already come across Odoo internally, so the open question was the partner. Conny chose Dynapps for its personalised approach and its experience in retail, a solution built for the field that let the team get started quickly. That domain expertise, the Dynapps Retail Module, and the working relationship Conny would still rely on a year later were what decided it.

A wall display of non-stick frying pans in various sizes hanging on rails in a cookware store, each with a red price tag.

How the rollout really happened

How Elektro Van Assche went live on Odoo retail.

  • 2021

    Incumbent ERP reached end of life. Conny's team found Odoo through an internal lead, and the search shifted to choosing a partner.

  • 2022

    Implementation with the Dynapps Retail Module, scoping POS, field service and the Niwzi PIM integration.

  • 2024

    By Conny's mid-2024 testimonial, the floor team, the road technicians and the website all ran on one Odoo backbone.

What we actually built

What Elektro Van Assche built on Odoo: counter, road and website.

The POS module shares one Odoo install with inventory, sales, accounting and the customer record, so a fast transaction is no longer a chain of handoffs between disconnected tools. A field-service module puts a tablet on every van. Technicians log time on the doorstep, record accessories and capture signatures, and the whole record goes straight to service and accounting at once. Niwzi, the PIM the trade already runs on, stays the central product database. Odoo pulls product data and stock availability from it, including for the website. Don't move the PIM, integrate around it. Two Dynapps consultants and three core people on the Elektro Van Assche side, backed by key users. A small team that kept decisions fast and feedback loops short.

Modules: CRM, sales, purchase, inventory, invoicing, accounting, POS, project, timesheets, field service, documents, contacts, calendar, employees, dashboards, studio.

Our studio

The discipline throughout.

The working principle Dynapps gave a name to: Retail Module first. Standard configuration of a sector-specific Odoo bundle goes in before any custom work, and customisation is reserved for cases where a specific business reality justifies the cost. For Elektro Van Assche, the bundle landed first; the integrations followed.

Warehouse worker scanning a barcode with a tablet
What was hard

Training a live shop floor without slowing checkout.

Two parts of the engagement didn't go on auto-pilot for the Dynapps team. The first was training the floor team without slowing the shop: the store is open six days a week in a busy retail environment, so there was no quiet window to pull staff off the floor for classroom sessions. The team learned the new system live, while customers kept coming in and checkout speed could not drop, and the training plan had to work around the trading day rather than the other way round. The second was holding the scope. On a project that touches the till, the road and the books at once, the temptation is to bring everything in together, and Dynapps had to push back on that more than once. Phase one was deliberately limited to the core (sales, POS, inventory, customer data), and optimisations were pushed to a later phase even when they would have been useful sooner.

Retail & wholesale
The collaboration with Dynapps is very personal; they are experienced individuals with great technical knowledge.
Conny Van Assche

Conny Van Ascche

Owner/Managing Director at Elektro Van Assche
The real win

From ‘how do we record this?’ to ‘what are we selling next?’

What changed for Elektro Van Assche isn’t visible in a single statistic. It’s a shift in where work happens. Before, the counter, the workshop, the road, the books and the website each ran on their own clock; every handoff was a place where a step got lost or a customer waited. After, the till and the tablet feed the same ledger by the end of the day, and the website pulls product data and stock from the same source the floor team works on. The question on the floor is no longer “how do we get this transaction recorded?” but “what are we selling next?” Conny puts the strategic version in her own words: “Today, we are fully enjoying the capabilities that this futureproof ERP package offers, enabling us to further facilitate our growth.” For a 60-year family business that intends to be there for the next 60, the win is that the back-office stops being something the team works around. It starts being a system the team grows with.

If this sounds familiar, let’s talk.

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