Scaling a manufacturer across three countries
Rhea Vendors Groep designs and manufactures vending machines for professional environments — coffee machines, snack dispensers, and combination units deployed in offices, healthcare facilities, and public spaces. With operations spanning the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany, the group needed an ERP backbone that could serve as a single source of truth while accommodating the fiscal and operational realities of each country.
FANATICS designed a three-phase rollout: the Benelux entity as the template, followed by the Austrian subsidiary, and finally the German operation. Each phase built on the previous one, reducing implementation risk and allowing lessons from earlier rollouts to inform later ones.
Phase 1 — Benelux as the template
The Dutch entity was the first to go live, in 2023. This phase established the core manufacturing and commercial processes in Odoo: production planning with bills of materials, purchase and inventory management, sales and customer portal, and Dutch-localized accounting. Field Service was implemented to support the service and maintenance arm of the business — technicians managing installations, repairs, and preventive maintenance on deployed machines.
Labels & Barcodes was deployed early in the process, giving the warehouse team a reliable way to track components and finished goods through production and dispatch.
Phase 2 — Österreich GmbH
The Austrian entity introduced additional complexity: Austrian fiscal requirements, a different VAT regime (ATU40171103), and ÖNORM-compliant accounting structures. FANATICS implemented the Odoo Austrian localization and adapted the chart of accounts and tax configuration accordingly.
For warehouse operations in Austria, Ventor Tech was integrated — a mobile warehouse scanning solution that gives the floor team a purpose-built app for receiving, picking, and inventory counts, without requiring full Odoo access on every device.
Phase 3 — Servomat Deutschland GmbH
The German rollout was the largest in terms of user count, with approximately 40 users onboarded. Germany brought its own requirements: German DATEV-compatible accounting, German-language training, and an integration with Apfel Storage Lift — an automated vertical storage system used in the German warehouse to manage high-density component storage.
The Apfel integration connects Odoo inventory movements to the automated lift: when a picking order is confirmed in Odoo, the storage lift is instructed to retrieve the relevant tray, reducing picking time and warehouse footprint errors.
Unified reporting, local operations
Despite the complexity of three country entities, the group operates from a single Odoo database. Inter-company transactions between Rhea Netherlands and its subsidiaries are handled natively in Odoo, and management reporting consolidates figures across all three entities. Each country team works in its own language and sees its own fiscal configuration, while the group has full visibility across the entire operation.
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