There are projects one talks about in the abstract — as an external consultant who delivers a system and leaves — and there are projects you live from the inside, with the P&L on the table and the responsibility of keeping the business running. The case of Cymit Química is the latter. I was CEO of the company during the complete technology transformation, and what follows is not a sales pitch: it is what happened, with its friction points and its verifiable results.
Context: a chemical company with three systems that did not talk to each other
Cymit Química was a distributor of reagents and laboratory chemical products with an extraordinarily wide catalogue: more than two million references from domestic and international suppliers. The actual operations ran on three completely independent systems:
- EuroWin as the management ERP: orders, delivery notes, invoicing. Software from a previous generation with limited integration capability and practically no API.
- Microsoft Access as the catalogue and reference database: dozens of Access files distributed across different teams, with inconsistent versions and no change control.
- Ad hoc Visual CRM for commercial management: contacts, opportunities and customer follow-up in a system that also did not synchronise with the ERP.
The result of this fragmented architecture was predictable: duplicate data, stock errors, a frequently outdated web catalogue, the inability to offer real-time prices to customers, and a support team that spent hours daily reconciling information between systems. The e-commerce website was practically static: updating the catalogue required manual intervention and the timelines were incompatible with market demands.
"The biggest enemy of growth was not the competition. It was our own technology ecosystem, which consumed operational energy instead of generating it."
The real challenge: not just technology, but a business model change
When I took over the executive leadership, it became clear from the first P&L analysis that the bottleneck was not commercial or logistical: it was the platform. The two-million-reference catalogue was a brutal differentiating asset — few distributors in Spain could offer that depth — but that asset was trapped in systems that prevented its proper exploitation.
The challenge had several simultaneous dimensions:
- Operational dimension: migrate the entire daily operations (orders, invoices, stock, suppliers) to a unified system without interrupting the business.
- Catalogue dimension: automate the management and updating of more than two million references from multiple suppliers with heterogeneous data formats.
- Commercial dimension: provide the sales team with a CRM tool integrated with the ERP so that customer information and operations spoke the same language.
- Team dimension: scale the internal technical capacity to sustain the platform and develop new features.
The solution: unified Odoo architecture and mass crawling
Platform choice: why Odoo
The decision to bet on Odoo as the single platform was not trivial. At the time there were more established alternatives in the chemical distribution sector, with greater market share and more references. The reason for choosing Odoo was strategic, not technological: we needed a platform that could grow as the business grew, with customisation capability without depending on a single vendor, and with a technical architecture open enough to build on it the automatic catalogue management system the business required. The open-source nature of Odoo was exactly that: technological sovereignty.
Migration from EuroWin and Access
The migration from EuroWin was the most delicate work of the project. EuroWin has no modern API; extracting the historical data of orders, customers, suppliers and delivery notes required a process of direct database extraction with intensive transformation and cleaning before loading into Odoo. The Access catalogue presented additional complexity: the files had naming inconsistencies, duplicate codes across suppliers and non-normalised fields that needed resolution before they could be imported as product references in Odoo.
The migration was planned in phases to minimise operational risk: first the master data (customers, suppliers, products), then the movement history, and finally the operational cutover with the system in production.
Mass crawling system for the references
The most differentiating element of the architecture was the crawling and scraping system for automatic catalogue management. With more than two million references from dozens of suppliers, manual updating was unfeasible. A system of Python pipelines was designed and implemented that:
- Performed automatic periodic extractions of supplier catalogues (via API when available, and via structured web scraping when not).
- Normalised the data with supplier-specific transformation rules, resolving inconsistencies of format, currency and unit of measure.
- Synchronised updates directly to the Odoo catalogue, keeping stock, prices and availability up to date in real time.
- Generated alerts when anomalies were detected or references required manual review.
This system turned the two-million-reference catalogue from an operational liability into a real competitive advantage: the Cymit website could offer availability and pricing information updated automatically, something that competitors without that infrastructure could not easily replicate.
Team scaling
At the start of the project, the technical team was one person. To sustain and develop the platform, a team-building process was necessary: from 1 to 5 people, incorporating QA, frontend development, backend development and data architecture profiles. This growth was managed gradually, aligned with the project phases and with the company's financial capacity at each point.
Results: real numbers and a verifiable exit
Revenue growth
During the period of technology transformation on Odoo, Cymit Química's revenue grew from €2M to €4M. It was not solely a consequence of the technology — commercial decisions, the expansion of the accessible catalogue and improvements in customer response capability all played a joint role — but the platform was the enabler without which that growth would not have been possible at that pace.
Exit to Grupo PALEX
The outcome of the process was the acquisition of Cymit Química by Grupo PALEX, one of the leading medical-surgical material and laboratory distribution groups in Spain. It was the company's second consecutive acquisition. A company with three incompatible legacy systems and a catalogue trapped in Access files is not acquirable at that level. The platform built on Odoo was a differentiating asset in the due diligence process: modern architecture, unified data, scalable operations.
What really changed
Beyond the figures, the structural change was one of operating model:
- From manual catalogue updates to automatic synchronisation with suppliers.
- From three disconnected systems to a single source of truth for all operations.
- From an emergency technical team to a product team with continuous development capability.
- From a company dependent on its inherited infrastructure to a platform that a strategic buyer could integrate into their ecosystem.
Lessons for your project
1. ERP migration is a business project, not an IT project
The most common mistake in ERP migrations is treating them as technology projects. At Cymit, every technical decision was first evaluated from the perspective of its impact on margin and daily operations. Which modules to implement first, which data to migrate with which priority, when to cut over: all those decisions were made with business criteria, not technical convenience.
2. The catalogue as a strategic asset
Two million references is a number that looks like a problem. Handled correctly, with the right automation architecture, it becomes a barrier to entry for competitors. The question is not «how do we manage this?» but «how do we turn this volume into an advantage?».
3. The platform must be acquirable
If at any point in your time horizon an acquisition is possible, the technology platform is part of the price. A company with Odoo well implemented, clean data and documented architecture is worth more in an M&A process than the same company with uninspectable legacy systems. Technology is due diligence.
4. Open source does not mean cheap: it means free
Odoo Community is not the consolation cheap option compared to SAP or Dynamics. It is the option that guarantees the code is yours, that you do not depend on licence renewals to keep operating, and that you can build on top of it without asking anyone's permission. That freedom has real economic value when the time comes to scale or to sell.
Do you have a similar project?
If you are evaluating migrating from a legacy ERP — EuroWin, Navision, Sage, A3 — to Odoo, or if you have Odoo implemented and it is not working at the level you need, I can review your situation with the same perspective I applied at Cymit: business first, then architecture. The initial technical audit is free for qualified projects.