LaboratoriesSeven specialised labs on one integrated Odoo and LIMS platform.
Lonestar Alpha Laboratories, the Omani laboratory services group running seven specialised departments since 2007, replaced its legacy LIMS and added a missing ERP on one platform in four months.
Sector
Laboratories.
Footprint
Oman, with new lab deployments planned across the EMEA region.
Scale
65,000 samples/year. 268 staff across the lab business, 83 active platform users.
Dynapps partner
Since 2024.
Backing
Independent. Founded 2007 in Oman; now the country’s largest and most diversified lab business.
Before Dynapps stepped in.
Lonestar Alpha Laboratories has been operating in Oman since 2007, growing into the largest and most diversified lab business in the country. Seven specialised laboratory departments cover civil and construction materials, mechanical and metallurgy, food safety, environmental monitoring, and mineral analysis. Each department lives by the same promise: reliable data that holds up under audit.
By the time Lonestar started looking for a new partner, the system underneath that promise had stopped keeping up. The existing LIMS was outdated and could not absorb the demands of seven specialised teams, and no ERP sat behind it. Hajer AlFutaisi, Head of the food testing department, saw the same gap from two sides: as a lab leader who needed live insight into sample status, and as the person on the hook for the regular reports to the wider administration. The lab business was scaling; the systems were not.
The challenge
Where the cracks showed.
Month-end reporting as a two-week project
Hajer’s team delivered regular reports to the wider administration on the back of manual spreadsheets. Each cycle pulled lab managers off operational work for up to two weeks to assemble the same numbers by hand, and reports landed long after the period they described.
Seven departments, seven sets of needs
Civil testing, metallurgy, food safety, environmental, mineral. Each lab had its own specialised testing parameters and its own reporting conventions. Holding all of it together in one system, without forcing every lab to flatten into a single template, was the problem the previous LIMS had never solved.
Why Lonestar chose Odoo with LIMS over a connector.
The trigger was not a new market or a regulator. It was a strategic decision inside Lonestar to add an ERP and replace the LIMS at the same time, on one platform rather than two systems glued together with a connector. As Hajer put it: "We were initially going to go with LabVantage, but since our company looked for an integrated ERP system, we landed on Odoo because of its open-source character and intuitive use. The choice for LIMS thereafter was evident, as it's the only integrated solution on the market that combines the strength of ERP and LIMS." Three paths on the table:
LabVantage as a standalone LIMS
The specialised LIMS Lonestar had initially planned to adopt. Would have solved the lab side but left the ERP question open and required a connector. Ruled out once the ERP decision was made.
Odoo with a standalone LIMS via a connector
Considered and rejected for the same reason: integration through a connector was not integration.
Odoo plus LIMs, embedded
LIMS is the only LIMS embedded directly inside Odoo ERP. No connector, one platform.
How the rollout really happened
How Lonestar went live on Odoo and LIMS in four months.
Early 2024
Implementation kickoff. Configuring the system, encoding lab parameters, testing methods and pricing.
Mid 2024
First lab department live, the 16-person team went live in one wave. Sample volumes ramped from a few dozen analyses to ten thousand samples per month.
2025
Phased rollout to two further departments; the remaining four follow on the same platform.
What Lonestar built: LIMS and Odoo ERP on one platform.
One integrated Odoo and LIMS platform now covers Lonestar's seven lab departments, replacing the legacy LIMS and adding ERP where there was none. LIMS holds the per-discipline testing parameters, sample lifecycle from submission to completion, and a two-layer reporting module: a universal standard across all seven departments, plus department-specific layers where needed. Alongside LIMS, Odoo accounting, purchase, sales and maintenance went live. Jennifer Defoux led for Dynapps; four months from kickoff to first department live, with the 16-person team at that lab moving in one wave rather than in trickles.
Modules: LIMS (sample lifecycle · per-discipline testing parameters · two-layer reporting), Odoo accounting, purchase, sales, maintenance.
The discipline throughout.
Every workflow that crossed the lab and the ERP had to live on one platform, not bridge between two systems. This was the rule that made LIMS the natural choice the moment the ERP decision was on the table, and it stayed the rule for every subsequent decision in the rollout.
Building one reporting standard across seven labs.
The reporting module was the section the team had to slow down for, not the section that solved itself. Seven specialised labs each had their own conventions for what a report should look like. The brief was harder than digitising any one of them: agree on a universal reporting standard across all departments first, then build the department-specific layers on top, without flattening the specifics out of existence. The trade-off was time. Hajer was direct about it: “It took us some time to get reporting right, but after that, we were up and running.”
We used to deliver manual spreadsheets that took two weeks to complete. Now I can easily filter and export reports, it’s a big impact.
Hajer AlFutaisi
Head of food testing department, Lonestar Alpha LaboratoriesWhat Lonestar taught Dynapps about multi-lab deployments.
Lonestar's seven-department footprint sharpened how Dynapps approaches multi-lab deployments. Two patterns followed. The multi-lab deployment methodology was reworked around consolidated data-set building: agree on the shared structure once, then layer per-lab specifics on top, rather than starting from scratch each time. And the report engine was modified with adaptations for multi-lab environments, supporting the universal-plus-specific reporting pattern the Lonestar build required. The longer target is to deploy a new lab on the platform in days, not months. Lonestar's own expansion across the EMEA region is the first test.
The numbers
By 2024, lab testing, ERP and reporting ran on one integrated platform.
What used to be two missing pieces, an outdated LIMS and no ERP behind it, is now one platform. LIMS handles the sample lifecycle and the testing parameters for each discipline, Odoo carries accounting, purchasing, sales and maintenance, and a two-layer reporting module gives every department a shared standard with its own specifics on top. The month-end reporting that pulled lab managers off the bench for two weeks is now a filter-and-export, and the platform is rolling out department by department across the group.
4
months kickoff to first department fully operational.
16
lab staff on the first department, live in one wave on day one.
2
weeks per regular report, now minutes via filter-and-export.
3
lab departments live or in active rollout, out of seven.
When reports stop being a project and become a query.
The default question at Lonestar's lab leadership level used to be "how long will this month's reports take?" That question has stopped being the bottleneck for what the lab can see and decide. The strategic posture shifts: from running labs that survive their reporting cycle to running labs whose data is available the moment it is asked for. Reports stop being a project and start being a query.
If this 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.
Go deeper
Read further.
Implement Odoo
From blueprint to go-live, built around how your industry actually operates.
Replacing a legacy ERP
The ERP that built the business now holds it back. Ten or twenty years of SAP Business One, Exact, Navision, Sage, or a custom build sits at the centre of operations, wrapped in integrations and spreadsheets only a few people understand.
Laboratories
From sample to result. LIMS for in-house and commercial labs.
More stories like this
- Energy & utilities
Energy & utilities
One Odoo platform for a multi-company energy consultancy: Tunérgia replaces Telegram, Excel and scattered tools
After sixteen years on paper, Excel and Telegram, Tunérgia put its multi-company energy consultancy onto one Odoo platform with Dynapps: leads, projects, signatures and surveys in one traceable place.
- Food & beverage
Food & beverage
One Odoo template across 14 Puratos production sites in four continents
Belgian family-owned ingredients manufacturer, 75 production units across 55 countries. Kept SAP at the largest sites; built one Odoo template for the smaller acquisitions.
- Financial services
Financial services
One Odoo backbone, from 100 to 36,000 leased bikes
Cyclis Bike Lease grew from a four-founder startup in Hasselt to 36,000+ leased bikes. Dynapps replaced the founders’ DIY setup with a single Odoo platform that scales with the business.
- Energy & utilities
Energie en nutsbedrijven
Sensorfact heeft het inkopen op basis van intuïtie vervangen door Odoo
Nederlandse klimaattechnologie-startup, met meer dan 200 medewerkers die 1.600 industriële klanten in 40 landen bedienen. Odoo heeft binnen vijf maanden het op gevoel inkopen vervangen door één systeem voor inkoop, voorraadbeheer, boekhouding en verkoop.
- Retail & wholesale
Retail & wholesale
One Odoo backbone, twelve European countries, one platform.
50Five carried one Odoo platform from a 2016 Dutch smart-home distributor to a B2B EV charging operator running 600,000+ charge points across twelve European countries, without forking the system.
- Retail & wholesale
Retail & wholesale
One Odoo backbone for a B2B safety distributor, with 95% of orders flowing through the web shop
A Spanish B2B distributor of high-visibility safety gear moved off a custom legacy system onto Odoo. A bulk-order grid on standard e-commerce now carries 95% of its orders.
- Professional services
Professional services
One Odoo across three Obiz Group entities
A listed French loyalty group put three entities on one Odoo within a year of an acquisition. The acquirer extended the platform its target had already chosen, covering accounting, purchasing and sales.
- Laboratories
Laboratories
Five apps, one LIMS, one Odoo platform
The world’s oldest gemmological laboratory, with 12 to 14 daily users in Paris. Moved its compliance, operations and reporting onto one Odoo platform with an embedded LIMS.
- Professional services
Professinal services
Evolink: one Odoo platform for an IT and telecom company, live across four Swiss sites in three months
Evolink runs managed IT and telecom for SMEs across four sites in French-speaking Switzerland. It moved quoting, projects, timesheets and invoicing onto one Odoo platform.
- Laboratories
Laboratories
Five Eurofins lab departments on one Odoo platform
Eurofins runs analytical testing across five departments in Riyadh under ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation. The lab replaced its 2017 system and manual bridging tools with an Odoo platform.