According to Maxime Grieshaber, founder and CEO of Captivea Luxembourg, Luxembourg’s SMEs need an “all-in-one” solution that can replace some or all of the various software applications required for their activities.
According to Maxime Grieshaber, founder and CEO of Captivea Luxembourg, 80 to 90% of Luxembourg SMEs and VSEs do not have the IT solutions they need.
Launched last April and based in Belval, the company is the Luxembourg subsidiary of Captivea, which is represented in France, the United States, Asia and now the grand duchy.
Founded in 2007, the group is specialised in the deployment, integration, development, maintenance and hosting of the Odoo solution.
Odoo is a business management software that allows users to manage different functionalities for the finance, sales, human resources, marketing departments.
The group is a certified Odoo partner and Odoo Gold.
Captivea Luxembourg provides consulting, deployment and integration of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) primarily for SMEs but also for medium-sized companies (ETI) and large groups.
Maxime Grieshaber looks back on the establishment of Captivea in Luxembourg, and draws up an inventory of ERP needs in the grand duchy.
Maxime Grieshaber, why did you choose the Luxembourg market?
I’ve been working in Luxembourg for about ten years and I have sales and marketing experience. During my activities within IT services companies, I had the opportunity to discover the Odoo solution and to follow its evolution.
Companies use on average 14 different applications (For instance, Excel, WordPress, MailChimp, project management solutions). This creates a complex environment to manage, creating integration, usage and long-term maintenance issues.
I was seduced by the power and simplicity of the Odoo tool and I chose to work with Captivea, the world leader in Odoo integration, and to develop its subsidiary in Luxembourg.
Why this choice?
It was a great human encounter at the right time! I was looking for a partner with strong Odoo expertise and an international scope. To support its organic growth, the Captivea group was in the midst of thinking about its development. The opportunity to create the Luxembourg subsidiary came at the right time.
Odoo is a fully integrated solution, easy to use, flexible and affordable for customers. Odoo was born in 2005 and every year the solution continues to gain in maturity and functionality. The market is growing rapidly!
How does the solution work, technically speaking?
Odoo applications are available via a web page. They can be launched from any device, including mobile. The customer chooses the type of deployment: public cloud, private cloud hosted in Luxembourg or via an installation on his local IT infrastructure. Odoo is an “all-in-one” solution that can replace some or all of the different software used by SMEs.
The solution includes thousands of applications, including thirty or so of the most widely used in all sectors of activity. Each module corresponds to dedicated operational and business processes – CRM (Customer Relationship Management), sales, accounting, invoicing, electronic signature, HR management, purchasing and inventory management, etc. – that the company chooses to integrate according to its requirements.
It chooses the basic applications, depending on its size and needs, and then adds other functionalities as it grows.
What functionalities do Luxembourg SMEs need the most?
They need the CRM brick, which allows them to optimise the management of commercial opportunities. Or the Sales module, which allows them to generate quotes in a few clicks. These bricks are linked to the Finance, Invoicing and Accounting modules, which are fully adapted to Luxembourg accounting. All of them are intertwined and connected to each other.
What are the average costs of an Odoo project?
An ERP project can quickly become very complex, requires several months or even several years of implementation and can therefore be a very important investment for the company. With more than 300 projects to its credit and a proven project methodology, Captivea has industrialised the deployment of the Odoo solution. The project budget generally varies between €10,000 HT and €100,000 HT depending on the number of users and modules and the complexity of the project.
What are the next steps in Captivea’s development?
Our priority objective is to satisfy the clients who trust us, but also to support and train our consultants over the long term, in order to gain expertise. We also want to develop synergies within the group and with our partners, to be able to respond to our clients’ requests, and finally to grow with a hundred Odoo consultants within Captivea in the short term.
