Financial services

One Odoo backbone, from 100 to 36,000 leased bikes.

How a Belgian bike-leasing pioneer scaled its operations more than 300 times on the same Odoo platform, by treating digitalisation as change management, not technology. 

Talk to an expert
See how we work
A woman on a road bike and a man on an e-bike ride side by side along a sunlit canal path, the man pointing ahead, with an arched bridge in the background.

Sector

Services, bike leasing as employer benefit.

Footprint

Belgium, Hasselt.

Scale

36,000+ bikes, €48M, ~40 employees.

Dynapps partner

Since 2017.

Backing

Founder-led since 2014.

How it started

Before Dynapps stepped in.

Cyclis Bike Lease, the Belgian bike-leasing operator now running a fleet of more than 36,000 bikes, started as a business-school assignment. In early 2014, four co-founders (Bart Criel, Joep Kempen, Guy Kempen and Geoffrey Van der Holt) incorporated the company in Hasselt to test a single proposition: bike leasing as an employer benefit. The market didn’t yet exist. The founders spent the first two years on product-market fit, opening accounts with SD Worx, AXA and Van Hout, persuading bike dealers used to faxes and paper to come along. The choice they were about to make would set the technical backbone for everything that followed. 

A Cyclis employee in a branded jacket walks away from the camera through the planted, daylit office toward the reception area.

The challenge

Where the cracks showed.

  • The fax question

    Cyclis depended on a national network of independent bike dealers. In the early years dealers asked whether Cyclis had a fax to receive orders; email was new to some. The sales channel ran on paper that didn’t connect to anything. 

  • The 2.5-person ERP team

    Bart from Cyclis chose Odoo deliberately and configured it himself, half-time. It worked for hundreds of bikes. But non-core work (server security, infrastructure) crowded out the rest. Two-and-a-half people could not run the company and the ERP at once. 

  • The next thousand bikes

    Every new lease added an insurance flow, an end-of-contract trigger, and a customer record that had to live for years. Hand-configuration with the team Cyclis had was going to break.

The turn

Why Cyclis chose an Odoo integration partner.

By 2016, growth had a deadline. The fleet was approaching the threshold where DIY configuration would stop scaling, and CEO Joep Kempen moved to find a partner. Three paths on the table: 

  • 01

    Keep buying support directly from Odoo

    The Cyclis team had already hit the limit of what software-maker support could solve at their stage.

  • 02

    Hire internal Odoo expertise

    Stayed in the running. Lost on speed-to-scale math; building in-house Odoo competency would have pulled founders off commercial work for too long.

  • 03

    Find an Odoo integration partner

    Joep landed on Dynapps after a structured search. The reasons he gives now are unromantic: head office near Hasselt, a team big enough to grow with Cyclis, and engineers who would learn the processes fast enough to keep pace with the company.

How the rollout really happened

How Cyclis scaled Odoo from a self-build to 36,000 bikes.

  • 2015

    Self-implementation on Odoo, run by Bart Criel from Cyclis.

  • 2017

    Partnership with Dynapps begins; first Odoo e-commerce implementation goes live.

  • 2020

    Bi-weekly onsite consulting cadence begins, just before COVID, a head start while competitors freeze.

  • Early 2023

    Operations split into projects and support; each track gets a consultant onsite one day a week, with weekly follow-ups

  • End 2023

    Replacement-bike fleet ships as a standard Odoo module, a market first, on a backbone now carrying 36,000+ bikes.

  • 2026

    Peppol e-invoicing readiness prepared ahead of the 1 January 2026 mandate.

What we actually built

What Cyclis runs on Odoo: the whole lease lifecycle.

Cyclis runs its entire lease lifecycle on Odoo: quotations and orders, order tracking, invoicing, e-commerce, field service, and the insurance workflows that handle daily theft and accident cases. What started as a configuration job around a handful of bike models is now an operating backbone that absorbs new products without redesign. The first major Odoo work was the e-commerce platform in 2017, a focused ~€15k scope: Mathias Tielemans and Axel on the Dynapps side, roughly five people on the Cyclis side. As the platform expanded, so did Cyclis's own team. One founder configuring Odoo half-time became a dedicated IT group (full-stack engineers, application support, infrastructure, business analysts), key users embedded per functional team, and a full finance stack (CFO, controller, accounting) sitting directly in the Odoo flows.

Modules: quotations & orders, order tracking, invoicing, e-commerce, field service, insurance workflows.

Our studio

The discipline throughout.

Out-of-the-box Odoo, configured for scale before scale arrived. Dynapps didn't just solve the 2017 problem; the team asked whether the same approach would still work at 30,000 bikes. As Odoo's standard functionality has matured, much of the early custom layer has retired in favour of standard modules.

A Cyclis advisor crouches with a tablet to inspect the drivetrain of a Ridley road bike while a customer leans over to look, in the showroom alongside a mounted Cannondale.
What was hard

Why Cyclis hardest challenge was change management, not Odoo.

The hardest part wasn't the platform. It was that Cyclis, as it scaled from four founders to forty employees, kept building processes in Odoo without involving the people who would actually run them.

Cyclis hit this wall more than once. Each iteration shipped technically; each one also surfaced operational habits the founders hadn't seen, because the people closest to the work weren't in the room when the design was decided. The friction was a habit of how change was managed, not a bug in Odoo or a gap in delivery. The lesson Bart's team now names openly: involve operational colleagues earlier. A digitalisation effort is a change-management effort first.

Financial services
Digitalisation projects are not technology projects. They are change-management projects.
Bart Criel

Bart Criel

Co-founder at Cyclis Bike Lease
How the work changed us

The onsite day is for the future.

What Dynapps takes from this engagement is the long arc, and one practice in particular. The bi-weekly onsite consulting cadence began at Cyclis just before COVID, ran through the pandemic, and gave Cyclis a head start at a moment when most competitors froze. In 2023, when Cyclis split operations into projects and support, each track got a Dynapps consultant onsite one day a week, with weekly follow-ups. The onsite day is for the future, not the present, where the two teams work through what's coming next before it hits the platform.

The deeper shift is that the relationship now runs on more than a service contract, and the same cadence shapes how Dynapps engages with customers whose processes change faster than a quarterly cycle can absorb.

Team on laptops in an open-plan office

The numbers

New products now ship in days, not months.

Two recent product moves show what the backbone unlocks. In late 2023 Cyclis launched a replacement-bike fleet for customers whose bikes are in for service, still a market first, and it shipped because a standard Odoo module plugged into the existing setup. The second move is regulatory: when Belgium confirmed Peppol e-invoicing would become mandatory on 1 January 2026, the team prepared it inside Odoo from 2023, ran the full test cycle, and aligned customers and vendors so the go-live was a calendar event.

36,000+

bikes on one Odoo backbone (2023).

€48M

revenue in 2023, on ~40 employees.

2

people handle all insurance flows, because every step is digital.

7+

years on the same platform, from a few hundred bikes to 36,000+.

The real win

From ‘next thousand bikes’ to ‘what’s next’.

The shift is in what Cyclis can now do without asking the platform’s permission. In 2017 the question was: can our Odoo configuration handle the next thousand bikes? By late 2023 it had become: what do we want to ship next? The replacement-bike fleet launch and the Peppol readiness for 2026 are the answers in miniature. The backbone holds; the team focuses on the product, not the plumbing. 

If this situation sounds familiar, let’s talk.

Wherever your business is heading and wherever it's getting stuck, an expert who has run this kind of work is the right person to start with, before you commit to a direction or a platform.

Talk to an expert
See how we work

Go deeper

Read further.

  • Implement Odoo

    From blueprint to go-live, built around how your industry actually operates. 

    Learn more

  • Scaling for the next phase of growth

    The business is ready to grow. The systems are not. A PE-backed trajectory, new markets, acquisitions ahead, and administrative overhead that drags on the very growth it should be enabling.

    Learn more

  • Financial services

    Onboarding, billing, and reporting, on one platform.

    Learn more

More stories like this 

Our success stories