How Nobi tracks every smart lamp from the Belgian assembly line to the care room.

The whole flow runs in Odoo: component order picking, assembly, serial and lot tracking across physical and logical warehouses, documented quality control, purchasing, sales, helpdesk and marketing, plus the integration that pushes every serial to Nobi's own cloud. The working principle was to parametrise before writing code. The sharpest tension sat in the serial numbers: in the original setup each serial was company-specific, while a later Odoo version dropped that model, cleaner in principle, but forcing a hard transition on data that was already live. Getting the parameters right inside standard Odoo, rather than reaching for custom code, was what made the difference; Dynapps wrote relatively little bespoke code. The traceability that resulted, a photo and a scan at every assembly step, down to the packed box, began as a discipline and became the factory's default, surviving both a version upgrade and staff changes. 

Modules: manufacturing, inventory (serial & lot tracking, multi-warehouse), barcode, purchase, sales, quality, helpdesk, accounting, email marketing, plus a custom Nobi-cloud integration that pushes serial numbers at assembly.

Not the technology. Across the engagement, Nobi was rarely held back by Odoo or the package itself. The difficulty was organisational: learning each other's language, understanding how Nobi's processes actually fit together, and setting the rules of the game while already on the field. Nobi also wanted to move faster than its own people could follow. 

The most candid lesson is a decision Nobi now regards as a mistake: it chose not to make Odoo mandatory across every department. Teams kept their own tools like Pipedrive, HubSpot, MailChimp because a dedicated app always offers more depth than one module inside a suite. Given the choice between a specialised app and being pushed into Odoo, Odoo loses that fight, not because it does the job badly, but because a single module is always a subset of a purpose-built tool. The cost surfaced with growth: islands of data that now, at 80-100 people, have to be pulled back together into a single source of truth. In hindsight, Nobi would not grant that flexibility again. 

Continuity was its own challenge. As Nobi grew, the customer-side team became less stable; in the summer of 2025 several people who knew the setup inside-out left the project at once, taking hard-won process knowledge with them. It is exactly why the traceability discipline and the documented configuration earned their keep.