Company Name: Charming Printing Limited
Location: Hong Kong, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Turkey, Guatemala, India, Sri-Lanka, Pakistan, Mexico, the United States, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, Mainland China
Industry: Printing
Company Size: 1000+
Apps Implemented: Dashboards, Sales, Employees, Barcode, Discuss, Maintenance, Manufacturing, Inventory, Accounting
Hosting Type: Odoo.sh
Implementation Partner: Aboutknowledge (Hong Kong) Limited (http://www.aboutknowledge.com/)
Charming Printing was founded in 1991 in Hong Kong. It is a specialty printing company that provides trim & label printing, packaging, and RFID technology solutions to amplify fashion brand stories in the retail industry. With 15 local offices and factories worldwide in America, Asia, and Europe, the company serves notable clients, including many of today's favorite brands.
At first, the printing company relied on several custom systems to manage its manufacturing, inventory, and sales process in most offices and deployed a local printing solution for operations in Vietnam. It didn't take long for the company to find flaws. With standalone custom systems and procedures, the teams lacked understanding and communication between each other and often missed to pass on details trivial to one team but crucial to the others. This workflow took the team two weeks to collect and consolidate data to generate reports and failed to reflect business performances in time, not to mention the hassle and possible error in sharing information across offices manually.
The Best of Both Worlds
As one of the internationally known label manufacturers in the fashion industry, the specialty printing company has a unique workflow compared to typical manufacturing or printing businesses to meet the high demand for custom labels. For example, it must adhere to the specific requirements of its customers regarding the materials and sizes of their offset, digital, or woven labels, rather than providing them with a range of options. This distinctive challenge drove the company to look for a comprehensive printing business management solution.
To benefit from both out-of-the-box and custom solutions, the company chose Odoo due to its comprehensive standard features and open-source nature, which allows for a solid foundation for easy customization to achieve complex workflows for optimized efficiency while minimizing costs for developing a system from scratch. Additional advantages of Odoo include its user-friendly interface and cloud hosting, which enables convenient deployment across the company's international offices.
With our local partner Aboutknowledge, the Hong Kong-based firm introduced robotic process automation (RPA) to conveniently communicate its customers' special requirements, such as standards and tag size, through the sales and manufacturing process and combined work and job orders to define work centers to all its manufacturing procedures. These custom features are all supported by Odoo Sales, Manufacturing, Purchase, Inventory, and other official apps.
Data Consolidation for Workflow Visibility & Easy Reporting
The integration of WOS, sales, invoices, and production workflows automates information on relevant SO for better and more timely customer service.
One of the biggest changes after using Odoo is added workflow transparency. Through the interconnected Odoo apps, the team can access the project status from Odoo Project, stock levels, and backdate calculations from Odoo Inventory and production status from Odoo Manufacturing, all within the same sales order, enhancing efficiency and coordination across departments.
The data in spreadsheets scattered across emails and texts is now a click away on Odoo, as the system stores "80% of the information my team needs," according to Ivanhoe. If the operational staff follows the SOP strictly, this will save the team much time on communication and manual data collection.
The level of data consolidation Odoo facilitates also contributes to painless report generation on Odoo Accounting. At any given instant, Odoo can generate simple reports, such as order and invoicing analysis, double entry inventory, etc., that reflect immediate business performance.
SOP for Team Collaboration
Odoo is scalable, and the multi-company feature is really useful.
Besides implementing business management software that raises workflow efficiency, Odoo also helped establish a standard operating procedure (SOP) across offices in Charming Printing. For example, the organization has developed a checklist for all employees at its offshore offices and factories to guarantee the thorough completion of all data entry tasks on Odoo.
Thanks to Odoo's multi-company feature and flexibility, the different offices can enjoy autonomy in managing the various operations and production lines. For instance, its subsidiary in Vietnam successfully implemented an e-invoicing app within a week to align with the local regulatory requirements. Meanwhile, the sales team can perform stock checks and inventory control online in seconds to speed up and create an exemplary customer journey—as information that took days to communicate via email previously can now be retrieved online in clicks.
Moreover, Charming Printing experiences an unexpected change in the mentality of its team. For one, team members are able to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the entire operation line. They even voluntarily set up checkpoints to evaluate the workflow through "truly reliable data" on Odoo, which significantly minimizes human error. Secondly, it is the increased mindfulness for accurate stats within the team as they now know this helps the team go a long way.
For Ivanhoe, it is much easier to manage work and support his staff via Odoo, as he is able to view all data centralized on one platform rather than jumping between tabs and windows within the numerous systems.
"People didn't really care about the other teams and it was common to have missing information here and there," Ivanhoe explained. "What comes with Odoo is the standard operating procedure and a spirit of collaboration that follows. The whole team has become more aware of checking for materials and stock levels now before moving forward on a project. Not only does this prevent manual error, but it also helps in largely cutting back-and-forth on communication."
Global Odoo Implementation
Having experienced much-streamlined workflow management, Charming Printing is ready to implement Odoo in the rest of its offices and factories in Bangladesh, the United States, and Guatemala in the near future.
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