Stitching Success: Suturing SurgiReal's Business Operations into Seamless Cohesion with Odoo

Every day, doctors and veterinarians perform life-saving procedures on humans and animals, impacting not only the patients they operate on, but the people who care about them as well. Surgeons spend four years in medical school and years in residency practicing and perfecting the intricate, incredibly complicated skills needed to be successful in their field. A critical component of this training is giving medical students the most effective tools to practice performing procedures. SurgiReal, a manufacturing company based in Loveland, Colorado, has made this goal the foundation of its business.

SurgiReal manufactures and sells realistic, reusable simulation materials to help students in healthcare learn and practice surgical skills. Founders Dr. Dean Hendrickson and Dr. Fausto Bellezzo first came up with the inspiration for SurgiReal when they were working at Colorado State University as veterinary surgeons and instructors. The two realized they needed a better way to teach their students how to suture, give an injection, drain a cyst, and perform other procedures of a similar nature. Up until that point, their students had been using things such as carpet pads, pig feet, and even orange peels as simulated skin to practice these techniques. The pair noticed that their students were forming bad habits by not practicing with something as close as possible to the real thing. Fueled by a desire to create better materials for their students, Hendrickson and Bellezzo applied for and secured a grant in late 2010 to research what material makes for the best suture pad. In 2012, SurgiReal became a company.

Medium RealSuture 6-Layer Suture Training Kit

Today, SurgiReal sells a variety of unique, life-like practice materials designed to equip medical students with not only the practice, but also the confidence to perform real-life surgeries down the line. The company’s primary and most popular product is a suture pad, available in seven variations, designed to mimic real skin layers and responses. The company also sells similar products in a veterinary capacity, as well as simulations for other body parts besides the skin. While suture practice materials have been available in the medical field for quite some time, SurgiReal is one of the only companies that focuses on smaller-sized task trainers. Other competitors sell larger, life-size mannequins that can become quite expensive compared to SurgiReal’s accessible suture pads. SurgiReal’s products are affordable so that students themselves can even purchase their own suture pads for practice. 

As SurgiReal explains, “Confidence in the clinic starts with competence in the classroom.” This mission to improve the quality of medical practice materials has driven the company to success, and with this success came an increasing need for an ERP system to manage its business operations. This is where Odoo comes in.

Before implementing Odoo, SurgiReal managed its business using various disconnected services, each with its own purpose within the company. It used Xero for accounting, Unleashed for inventory management, Hubdoc for receipt, and Salesforce for CRM. These disjointed platforms caused issues with information sharing and visibility, particularly when it came to reporting. As Andrew Hendrickson, former CEO and current Executive Chairman of the Board, explains:

[Our main pain point was] the sheer amount of effort that went into trying to do any kind of reporting that needed to span multiple business operations. So if we needed something that was kept in the accounting software but we also needed to tie it into our inventory management software, it just becomes a Herculean spreadsheet list.

Using a piecemeal approach to running the business wasn’t working for SurgiReal– time and manpower were wasted simply working and navigating the system rather than focusing on its products. Andrew details the frustrations that he and other team members were facing:

Invariably, a connection would break, and then you have to figure out where, and then you have to go back and repopulate data that was missing until you figure out the connection was broken. You waste a lot of time moving between tools that could be spent on driving business forward rather than fixing broken connections.

While there was no specific breaking point that led the company to seek out alternative solutions to its old system, Andrew explains that when he joined the company in the Summer of 2018 with a background in IT, he knew almost immediately that the company would have to look into switching to an ERP. Surigreal’s old way of doing things was simply unsustainable. 

Medium RealSuture 3-Layer Suture Pad

SurgiReal explored five to six different ERP options, including Netsuite, before landing on Odoo as the best fit for its needs. At the time, Odoo was available in a very modular, “a la carte” option, allowing SurgiReal to grow into the solution without purchasing the entire database at once. Instead, the company could start small and expand the number of applications it was using incrementally as it grew. And this is exactly what they did.

Andrew describes SurgiReal’s implementation with Odoo as easier than most other software implementations he’s been a part of during his career. This is particularly thanks to the company’s Odoo customer success representative, Yunhe Song, who supported them throughout the entire process:

"The customer success rep we worked with was really great and was able to methodically walk us through what needed to be done, how the data​​needed to come over, and then we executed on it."

SurgiReal went live with Odoo around the Summer of 2021, and the change in the company’s ease of operations and oversight has been more than tangible. Manufacturing has been an especially useful Odoo application for SurgiReal, given that the bill of materials for its finished products are fairly complex. Andrew says that other options they looked at didn’t have as effective of a way to handle the company’s specific processes. He details SurgiReal’s manufacturing process from start to finish, which has been streamlined due to Odoo’s integration across applications:

Our sales reps are inputting orders as they’re moved from leads to opportunities. When they close a deal, it generates a sales order that gets approved and then goes straight into manufacturing. And then, our manufacturing supervisor is able to build work orders based on what we have going out in the next week or the next 2 weeks. And they're able to see the material that we’ve got on hand to be able to make those things. And then schedule what gets made so that we’re able to continue to maintain an integrated flow of manufacturing, shipping, and being able to get orders out in a timely manner.

Hollow Organ - Stomach

He explains that accurate reporting has also been a huge benefit that Odoo has provided SurgiReal, giving the company more insight and projecting capabilities than with their previous, piecemeal system. In general, Odoo’s overall integration has had a positive impact on the business’ workflow from start to finish:

“Just being able to bring all of our data into one pane of glass has been a really helpful way for us to see the business the way it actually is. We’re not seeing things as we think it is or as we hope it is; we’re seeing actual results, and we’re able to see that process all the way from the first time we contact a customer all the way through getting a purchase order from them, building out the order, shipping it, and then invoicing on the back end. It’s just seamless end to end.”

Odoo has allowed SurgiReal to carry out a more efficient and connected workflow from start to finish, including manufacturing its unique products and reporting relevant information. With such a paramount mission of helping future surgeons be better prepared for their impending careers, SurgiReal now has the time and resources to focus on getting its products to those who need them—thanks to Odoo.