How Odoo Experts built scalable BI & integrations with Peliqan
Odoo Gold Partner
Odoo Experts founded in 2012 by Erwin van der Ploeg. The team delivers pragmatic ERP implementations across finance, sales, inventory, and purchasing – with a strong focus on clarity, speed, and quality.
What sets them apart: every consultant is a generalist who can handle accounting, sales, and inventory. No hand-offs, no silos. With 350+ successful projects and 10+ specialists, they operate as partners, not suppliers.
Projects Delivered
350+
Data Sources
250+ via Peliqan
Pipelines
SQL + Python
The Challenge
As Odoo Experts scaled beyond 350 implementations, the same friction kept surfacing: serious reporting hit the limits of Odoo’s live operational database, integrations required custom code that created upgrade debt, and historical data analysis was nearly impossible across systems.
Heavy reporting queries on live Odoo operational databases.
Complex Excel reports requiring manual calculations.
Custom integrations that create upgrade and maintenance issues.
Difficulty analyzing historical data across systems.
Let's hear from Mark
Mark Scheffel, Operational Director at Odoo Experts, explains how Peliqan became a core layer for integrations & analytics.
Hi Mark, can you introduce yourself and your role at Odoo Experts?
Sure. I’m Mark, Operational Director. I’m not the one doing integrations day to day, but I am ultimately responsible for all implementations.
So the following fall under me:
→ Project management
→ Consultants
→ Support
Basically everything except sales.
In practice it’s also a bit broader than the org chart. If something needs steering or unblocking, I’ll jump in. The main thing is: I keep delivery moving and keep quality high.
What makes Odoo Experts unique?
We care a lot about top quality. That also means we’re not always the cheapest, but we aim to be the best option for the job.
We’re also:
✓ Fast and decisive
✓ No long bureaucratic processes
✓ Focused on getting things solved
✓ Communicating openly and directly
You hire us for expertise, and we’ll tell you what we think, even if it clashes with the first idea a client has in mind.
And a big one:
We work as partners, not as a supplier.
The client has to engage too. That’s how you actually land a strong implementation.
You mentioned a pretty unusual thing for an ERP partner: everyone can do accounting. Why?
Because everything ends up in the books anyway.
We don’t want situations where people constantly have to hand off work like:
→ “Ask the finance consultant.”
→ “Ask the sales consultant.”
→ “Ask the inventory person.”
That’s slow, and SMB customers hate it.
So we hire and train people as generalists. Everyone can do finance, sales, inventory, purchasing. It keeps projects smoother and it keeps communication simple.
When do you hit the limit of "let's keep BI inside Odoo"?
Pretty quickly, once questions get serious.
Odoo is broad and can do a lot. Our default is to keep as much as possible inside Odoo. But BI is different.
You’re working with:
→ A live operational database
→ Spreadsheet-style reporting inside Odoo
That setup simply isn’t made for real BI questions at scale.
You can do a bit… and then you hit a wall.
And then there's the reality of other tools. What do you typically need to connect?
We try to avoid connecting extra tools, but some things you just don’t solve inside Odoo. A PIM is a good example. There are other systems too.
Historically, once you start connecting those, you end up with custom work. And custom work follows you into upgrades. New Odoo version, more migration work. That’s always painful.
What was your "this needs to change" moment before Peliqan?
We saw the same pattern repeating across projects:
→ More requests for integrations
→ More reporting needs
→ More custom logic that we then had to keep migrating
And you also get approached with “low-code can connect everything” platforms. But as a technical partner, you still run into limits. You don’t want a black box when things get specific.
So we needed something that stays flexible, stays transparent, and doesn’t force us into long term technical debt.
Why did Peliqan feel like the right fit?
Two things came together.
First
Integrations got easier. Peliqan talks about one-click ELT from 250+ sources, and that kind of coverage changes how fast you can move.
Second
Everything goes through the data layer. That brings a built-in data warehouse into the picture.
So BI becomes:
→ A natural next step
→ Not a separate project
→ Not something that starts from scratch
How do your consultants actually work with it day to day?
We use Python and SQL a lot. That fits our team, because our people are technical enough to go deep when needed.
What surprised me is how accessible it is for new people too. Someone can come in without an IT background, but if they’ve done:
→ A small Python script
→ A SQL query before
They can actually start building things. That’s huge for us, because it makes the skill set easier to grow internally.
And the AI support helps too, both in getting started and in moving faster.
What's a simple example that used to turn into heavy Odoo customization?
Reporting windows in Excel. A manager asks: Sales numbers for the last
→ 30 days
→ 60 days
→ 90 days
→ And 6 months
In Odoo you can export raw data, but once you want those calculated fields, you either end up with complex spreadsheets or you build custom calculated fields in Odoo. That quickly becomes technical debt.
Now we pull the raw data into Peliqan, calculate with SQL, and push the result into an Excel that the manager can work with. The user stays in the tool they like, and we avoid adding code inside Odoo for something that’s really a data question.
What are the use cases where Peliqan really unlocked new options for you?
BI Snapshots
Odoo records evolve – quotes become sales orders. With Peliqan’s warehouse layer, Odoo Experts can capture historical states for proper BI analysis.
Painless Migrations
Instead of CSV templates & stressful production imports, source data is transformed in Peliqan and the pipeline reruns cleanly for every test.
Historical Data & Purchase Advice
Historical orders live outside Odoo, combined with current sales to compute purchase advice and even create purchase orders back in Odoo.
If you had to sum up the impact of Peliqan in one sentence?
It’s been eye-opening. It opened up a lot of possibilities for us. We even notice internally that people now ask: can we handle this with Peliqan? That’s probably the best sign. It’s not just a tool we use. It became a default option we think with.
Before & After Peliqan
Before
- Heavy queries on live Odoo database
- Complex spreadsheets for calculated fields
- Custom integrations creating upgrade debt
- CSV-based migrations with manual testing
- No historical reporting across systems
After
- One-click ELT into a built-in data warehouse
- SQL calculations pushed to Excel automatically
- Standard connectors - no custom code to maintain
- Rerunnable pipeline migrations, same flow for go-live
- Historical data combined with current Odoo data for BI
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