Food & beverage

One Odoo template across 14 Puratos production sites in four continents.

Puratos kept SAP at its largest facilities and built one Odoo template for everything else, now running across 14 production sites on four continents. 

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Filling machine dispensing cans on a beverage line

Sector

Food & beverage manufacturing.

Footprint

14 production sites across 4 continents (Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe).

Scale

230 active users on one Odoo template.

Dynapps partner

Since 2019.

Backing

Family-owned, Belgian, founded 1919.

How it started

Before Dynapps stepped in.

By 2019, Puratos was running 75 production units across 55 countries, generating €3.1B in annual sales as a Belgian family business founded in 1919. SAP carried the largest facilities. But Puratos kept acquiring smaller manufacturers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, start-ups and family operations where ERP exposure was thin and IT infrastructure was patchy. Luc Van Mulders, Regional Application Manager, had watched that gap widen for years. A 25-year Puratos veteran, he had moved from BeLux finance into international IT in 2012, when the group rolled out SAP as its leading ERP. A lighter version of SAP had already been tried at the smaller sites. It was still too heavy for users with no prior ERP experience. The next platform would have to fit a different shape entirely. 

bread photo

The challenge

Where the cracks showed.

  • The acquired subsidiary in spreadsheet mode

    A newly absorbed manufacturer in Kenya or Slovenia would land inside the group with its purchase orders, production execution, and finance reconciliation spread across a dozen Excel files. Group reporting expected consistent numbers. What came in was whatever the local team had assembled by hand. 

  • The local tax filing

    Kenya’s revenue authority did not accept consolidated SAP entries. It expected returns to flow through specific electronic devices and government interfaces that no central system could satisfy on its own. The same pattern repeated in every new country, every regulator with its own filing logic. 

  • The lighter version that still was not light enough

    Before Odoo entered the picture, Puratos had tried a stripped-down version of its leading ERP at the smaller sites. Still too dense. Too many screens, too much process, too much training for people who had never run an ERP before. 

The turn

Why Puratos chose one Odoo template over a lighter SAP or per-country ERPs.

By 2019, the pattern was clear. Puratos would keep acquiring businesses in markets where SAP’s cost and complexity would never recover. The question was not whether to add an ERP. It was which one, and with whom. Two implementation partners reached the shortlist: Dynapps and Logic Soft. Both were introduced by Odoo’s account manager, who saw that a multinational with Puratos’s regulatory complexity would need a partner with the scale to match. Puratos chose Dynapps as the most professional fit for international, multi-country work. Three paths sat on the table. 

  • 01

    A lighter version of SAP

    Already tried, already rejected, still too heavy for sites with limited IT exposure.

  • 02

    A different mid-market ERP per country

    Ruled out for the standard reason: no economies of scale, no consistent group reporting, no single template to update.

  • 03

    Odoo, under one template, with a single experienced implementation partner

    Three reasons Luc names directly: web-based, so no local install burden; intuitive enough that he described it internally as “playing with an iPad”; and strong built-in localisations for the regulator-heavy markets where Puratos was acquiring most.

How the rollout really happened

From kickoff to Kenya live in under two months, then a multi-site rollout.

  • 2019

    Kickoff at Odoo Experience. Template designed jointly with Dynapps.

  • 2020

    Kenya goes live, under two months from project start.

  • 2021

    Korea, Taiwan, Slovenia and other sites follow. Korea’s 5,000 monthly sales-order lines and external logistics pull an EDI flow into the template, fine-tuned with every release.

  • Recent

    Ecuador is the most recent; 14 sites in total.

What we actually built

What every Puratos site runs: five Odoo modules on one shared template.

Five Odoo modules form the spine of every rollout: Sales, Inventory, Manufacturing, Accounting, and Purchase. Accounting carries the most weight: every site aligns its books to Puratos’s global analytic account structure while satisfying local tax-filing rules that vary country by country. An EDI flow was added later, never originally scoped, and is now part of every rollout. 

The Kenya pilot ran with one Dynapps consultant alongside a two-person Puratos finance team, Fran and Johan, who anchored the rollout from the customer side, kickoff to go-live in under two months. After Kenya went live, Dynapps shifted from implementer to quality controller: every local Odoo Gold Partner submitting code for a new country now passes through a documented Dynapps process before merging into the template. 

Modules: sales, inventory, manufacturing, accounting, purchase, EDI.

Our studio

The discipline throughout.

The engagement ran on a principle Puratos gave a name to: protect the template, customise only where the regulator forces the hand. Standard configuration of the Odoo bundle goes in first; customisation is reserved for cases where a specific local regulation or business reality justifies the cost. Luc set that standard early. It held, and it survived the first upgrade. 

Copper distillation stills in a distillery
What was hard

What was hard: walking away from a half-finished upgrade.

The first major Odoo upgrade did not go smoothly. Puratos had taken the upgrade to a different partner to save cost. It stalled. On a Saturday evening, Luc called Dynapps from inside the broken upgrade to ask whether it was salvageable. The honest answer Dynapps gave was: stop, prepare better, come back in two weeks. The upgrade was rolled back. Two weeks later, with the preparation Dynapps insisted on, it went through cleanly. 

The hard part was not the technical fix. It was admitting that taking the upgrade to a cheaper partner had been the wrong call, and accepting that the right move was to walk away from a half-finished upgrade at the worst possible moment in a project timeline. Luc names this directly: it was a hard lesson. 

Food & beverage
Odoo is like playing with an iPad. That is exactly what you need when you are going live in Kenya or Korea with a team that has never used an ERP before.
Luc van Mulders

Luc Van Mulders

Regional Application Manager at Puratos
How the work changed us

From full-time implementer to gatekeeper of template quality.

The shape of the engagement changed as the rollout matured. Dynapps started as the implementer that built the original template alongside Fran and Johan in Kenya. After Kenya went live, the role evolved: gatekeeper of code quality for every new country, project manager for the escalations where Puratos and a local Gold Partner could not find common ground, advisor for the larger architectural calls. Puratos engages cheaper local Gold Partners for the bulk of country-specific work; Dynapps holds the standard and steps in when things go wrong. The cadence has slowed as confidence has grown: what started as a weekly call has settled into a three-week rhythm built around specific releases and topics, no longer the full-time scaffolding the rollout once needed. 

bread

The numbers

The outcome: 14 sites and 230 users on one template.

One template now carries production across four continents, and new sites join through a documented quality gate rather than a fresh ERP selection each time. 

14

production sites running on the same Odoo template

230

active users worldwide.

< 2 months

kickoff to go-live for the Kenya pilot.

4

continents covered: Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe.

The real win

From which ERP to how fast the next site clears quality control.

When the next acquisition lands on the Puratos roadmap, the question is not which ERP this site should get. It is which version of the template fits, and how fast the local Odoo partner can clear quality control. That shift, from feasibility to onboarding speed, is what the template was built to make possible. It also protects the partnership: every new country gives Dynapps another set of edge cases, and the template gets harder to break with every site that goes live. 

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.

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