Green energyEnergy & utilities

Sensorfact replaced gut-feel purchasing with Odoo.

By 2023, Sensorfact had grown to 200 people and 1,600 customers in 40 countries. Procurement still ran on instinct. Five months later, Odoo had replaced it.

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Sector

Energy. B2B climate-tech and Industrial IoT.

Footprint

3 home countries (Netherlands, Germany, Spain), serving customers in 40 countries.

Scale

1,600+ industrial customers, 200+ employees.

Dynapps partner

Since 2023.

Backing

Venture-backed. €13M growth round 2022, €25M growth round 2023.

How it started

Before Dynapps stepped in.

Sensorfact was founded in 2016 in Utrecht by Pieter Broekema, a former energy consultant who had watched industrial companies struggle to put a real number on their own energy consumption. The product is deliberately low-cost: smart IoT sensors that monitor energy use and surface machine-maintenance signals, backed by tailored advisory work for production businesses. By the time Dynapps came into the picture in mid-2023, Sensorfact had grown past 200 people across the Netherlands, Germany and Spain, was serving over 1,600 industrial customers in 40 countries, and had just closed a €13M growth round. Hans Beuker, COO, sponsored the engagement. The systems holding the company together were starting to creak.

Overhead view of two technicians operating the control panel of a large blue production machine in a factory.

The challenge

Where the cracks showed.

Stock visibility had eroded as Sensorfact scaled, and purchasing decisions were running on instinct rather than data. For a 200-person company shipping sensors to 1,600 industrial customers in 40 countries, that was not sustainable. Underneath it sat two structural problems.

  • Inventory tracked offline, across fragmented tools

    Stock lived across a scatter of offline tools rather than one system. As the company scaled, the picture of what was actually on hand and what was on order got harder to trust.

  • No centralised product masterdata

    There was no single product masterdata structure to lean on. Without it, every downstream process, purchasing, inventory, sales, worked from its own version of the catalogue.

The turn

Growth outran the spreadsheet.

€13M closed in 2022, €25M followed in 2023. The instinct-based purchasing was no longer a side issue. It was the system question that would decide whether operations could keep up with sales.

Sensorfact came directly to Odoo and partnered with Dynapps for the implementation. No competing ERPs were weighed in the qualification calls. The choice was not “which ERP” but “an ERP or not.”

Two men review a screen together on a factory floor, one in a white shirt pointing at the display while the other looks on.

How the rollout really happened

How Sensorfact went live on Odoo in five months.

  • 2023

    Dynapps partnership begins.

  • June 2023

    Analysis phase begins.

  • July 2023

    Implementation starts.

  • September 2023

    Odoo live across purchase, inventory, accounting and sales.

  • End 2023

    €25M growth round closes.

What we actually built

What Sensorfact runs on Odoo: purchase, inventory, accounting and sales.

Four Odoo modules went live in five months: purchase, inventory, accounting and sales. The intent was narrow on purpose: put the spine of the business onto one system, give the operations team visibility on what was in stock and what was on order, and move the purchasing decision from a feel exercise to a data one.

Engagement shape: five months from first contact to go-live in September 2023. On the Dynapps side, Satish Sewnarain led the engagement in a hybrid role, business consultant and project manager. On the Sensorfact side, Hans Beuker, COO, was the project sponsor. (Total Dynapps headcount and the Sensorfact-side key-user team are not in the source.)

Modules: purchase, inventory, accounting, sales.

Our studio

The discipline throughout.

Scale-up implementation: start basic with discovery, then move directly into implementation rather than over-engineering scope upfront. The cadence borrows from the way scale-ups themselves operate, choose the minimum viable shape, get it live, refine afterwards. It is the principle that defined this engagement.

Close-up of hands holding a tablet showing the Sensorfact energy-monitoring dashboard with a bar chart, in front of blurred factory equipment.
What was hard

Going live while still learning the system.

The project moved very fast. The five-month timeline asked a lot of the key users at Sensorfact, who had to keep running the business while learning Odoo at the same speed Dynapps was configuring it. The team went live while still learning the system.

That trade-off is workable, but it carries a system-hygiene cost. When a team configures, tests and adopts a new ERP all in the same months, the cleanliness of the data, the discipline of the workflows and the maturity of the standard operating procedures all take a hit that has to be paid down afterwards. Sensorfact got the go-live; the work of cleaning up behind it was part of the deal.

How the work changed us

The scale-up implementation approach, now standard for fast-growing customers.

The Sensorfact engagement crystallised a pattern Dynapps now applies to other fast-growing scale-ups: a deliberately compressed implementation approach. Start basic. Lead with discovery. Move directly into implementation rather than over-engineering scope upfront. The principle borrows from the way scale-ups themselves operate, choosing the minimum viable shape, getting it live, refining afterwards. It is now part of how Dynapps approaches engagements where the customer's pace of growth will outrun any traditional ERP timeline.

Insulated pipes and tanks in an energy plant

The numbers

By September 2023, the spine of the business ran on Odoo.

Five months after first contact, the spine of the business sat on one system. Purchase, inventory, accounting and sales went live together in September 2023, moving the operations team from offline inventory across fragmented tools to one source, and the purchasing decision from instinct to data.

5

months from first contact to go-live.

4

modules live at go-live: purchase, inventory, accounting, sales.

The real win

From ‘what do I think we need?’ to ‘what does the data say?’

The shift was not a module list. It was a change in the default question. Before Odoo, the buyer’s question was ‘what do I think we need this week?’ After Odoo, the question is ‘what does the data say we need this week?’ For a 200-person climate scale-up adding customers across 40 countries, that shift is what lets the operations team keep up with the commercial team. The instinct-based version of Sensorfact had a ceiling. The data-based version does not, or at least not the same one.

If this sounds familiar, let’s talk.

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