Project 701 ~ Odoo ~ Venus Informatics

My 3rd year project proposal started to form without me really knowing it during my first year DAT501(database) class, which at the time was taught by my now best friend Krupesh Desai. At the time Krupesh was working at the NMDHB(Nelson Marlborough District Health Board) on a solution to merge all of the DHB’s throughout New Zealand onto one platform. Around May the following year I had met Krupesh again at an ITP (IT Professionals) meeting where I asked him a question on feasability of a malware detecting AI. The topic lead to him telling me about his new company which was data-driven and AI facing. After the ITP meeting Krupesh gave me his business card and told me to contact him. This led to us meeting on Saturdays where Krupesh would teach me concepts like ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and big data. This got me excited. So much that I stopped learning C# (the language used throughout the course at NMIT) and begun learning Python. This would lead me down interesting paths like my WEB601 final assessment, which was a website using the MVC design pattern and the LAMP stack. Rather than using PHP though, I used a framework called Flask in Python. I met with Krupesh on weekends over the next 2 years, learning a lot of new things that I had never even concieved before.

One of those things being Odoo, the open-source technology that has been around for 10+ years and drives small companies to behemoths like Toyota. Odoo has been around since 2003 and contains over 30 core modules and well over 9000 modules available on the marketplace, covering different categories. What drew me in and sold me on it was when he talked about the data-driven side of the system and how when you enter information into one module, all current/future models are also populated with the information. This means data entry is a one and done thing. Let’s take for example a simple setup with 2 modules; inventory and sales management. When a sale is made through the sales management module, the inventory module is updated and the given items are deducted/added. This means that small to medium companies (SMEs) can start out with only 1 or 2 modules and add new modules as they grow, without having to manipulate the data every time they want to expand. With all that in mind I would like to point back to the fact that Odoo is open source, meaning you have access to every last bit of code used within the ecosystem. Although you don’t want to ever actually edit the core components themselves, this does allow developers to extend those modules or create entirely new ones with the necessary skeleton of an Odoo module.