Stratos partnered with Castalie to audit and overhaul an aging IT infrastructure. By moving away from a limiting monolith to a "Best of Breed" stack, Stratos designed a roadmap to secure revenue, optimize field operations, and support Castalie’s rapid growth.
Castalie is a French leader in sustainable water filtration systems for businesses and restaurants, offering an eco-friendly alternative to plastic bottles. They provide micro-filtered water fountains and manage the entire lifecycle, including financing, installation, and maintenance.
"Stratos' analysis helped us shift our perspective. They provided a strategic roadmap that has effectively driven our IT vision for the next two years."
For four years, Castalie relied on a heavily customized Odoo ERP as its single source of truth. However, as the company scaled, this monolithic approach became a liability rather than an asset. Stratos was mandated to answer a critical question: Is Odoo still the right technology to support the group's future growth? The audit revealed severe limitations:
Technical Debt & Cost: The system had become a "monolith" that was costly to maintain (€330k/year) and prone to regressions, with unstable modules like contracts.
Financial Leakage: Complex leasing models (tripartite contracts) were managed poorly in Odoo, leading to invoicing errors and nearly €1 million in unpaid or unbilled revenue.
Operational Silos: Teams were forced to work around the system. Sales used manual entry for leads , and technicians lacked offline tools for field reports.
Customer Friction: A dysfunctional client portal forced 40% of customer support requests to be handled manually by the Customer Success team, diverting them from high-value tasks.
Stratos deployed a comprehensive 360-degree IT audit methodology:
Stakeholder Interviews & Process Mining: Stratos conducted interviews with managers and operational staff across Sales, Logistics, Finance, and Tech to understand daily friction points. This included screen-sharing sessions to visually audit tool usage.
Gap Analysis: The team mapped existing processes against the capabilities of the current Odoo stack, identifying critical gaps in the "Cash" vision (leasing/finance) versus the "Business" vision (fountain management).
Scenario Planning: Stratos developed three distinct target architecture scenarios—Light, Medium, and Enterprise—ranging from simple SaaS integrations o robust ERP implementations allowing Castalie to choose based on budget and ambition.
Phased Roadmap: A detailed 5-workstream action plan was created to prioritize high-impact areas: Finance/ADV, Technician Management, Portal, CRM, and Data.
Strategic Decoupling: Recommended splitting the monolithic architecture by moving complex financial flows (leasing contracts) out of Odoo into a specialized financial ERP (Sage, Netsuite, or Pennylane) to secure cash flow.
Operational Efficiency: Identified a path to reduce Customer Success ticket volume by 30-40% through a new, functional client portal.
Field Productivity: Proposed a specialized Field Service Management tool to optimize technician routes and enable offline reporting, targeting a 30% productivity gain.
Data Visibility: Designed a central Data Platform to break down silos, finally allowing for granular reporting on CAC, LTV, and churn—metrics previously unavailable due to Odoo's siloed data structure.
Revenue Security: Established a plan to reduce the 90-day DSO and recover historical unbilled revenue by structuring a rigourous ADV (Sales Administration) process.
