Three clients, three system changes, results you can verify
From an alumni network to a nationwide professional platform to a newly founded sports retailer: what the starting position looked like, what we implemented, how long it took, and what measurably changed afterwards. No polished success stories: three projects with names, figures and people you can ask.
48% less administrative work: how the FH OÖ Alumni Club brought its entire operation into one system
Alumni Club of the FH Oberösterreich: the graduate network that keeps former students connected with each other and with their university.
The association's existing system was no longer being developed or maintained by its vendor. Continuing to run it was not an option, which left the club facing a complete system change, including every membership and accounting record built up over years.
For an association, that is a delicate operation. The membership database is not just any database; it is the substance of the organisation: contacts, affiliations, contribution histories, connections grown between graduating years. A migration must lose none of it and drop no one.
The changeover was prepared accordingly: members were informed in advance, several times, through newsletters and the website, so that nobody was caught off guard.
E&P Solutions first migrated all legacy data safely into a new Odoo environment. Only then did the actual work begin: digitalising the association step by step, rather than rebuilding the old system one to one.
- Finance inside the ERPDirect bank account integration so that incoming and outgoing payments are posted cleanly. Invoicing and membership fees now run automatically through subscription models: the annual contribution run is no longer a project, it is a routine task.
- Accounting without media breaksStandardised import and export of BMD accounting data, from a single system. No collecting, no reformatting, no intermediate spreadsheet.
- New forum moduleMembers exchange ideas through the integrated chatter, find former classmates in the database and contact them directly. A dedicated area lets companies reach members and post job openings, turning membership administration into an active network.
Everything now runs in one system, with measurable effects both in the association's office and for the members themselves.
Administrative workload dropped by 48 per cent, because data is no longer maintained twice and imports and exports run at the click of a button. For members, the time needed to keep their own details up to date was cut in half.
The effect goes beyond administration. The association has moved closer to the university and its degree programmes: members contribute suggestions, give feedback and stay involved, a tangible gain for the bond between graduates, association and university.
"The new platform is more modern, clearer and, what I personally appreciate, has brought me closer to my university again. I am more involved in what is happening, and I see that as real added value, for me and for the association."
System change and a new website in 90 days, without a single day of downtime
ReTurn: Austria's central platform for restructuring and turnaround. The platform is backed by leading advisory and financial institutions, among them KPMG, Deloitte, PwC, BDO, Raiffeisen, Sparkasse and KSV1870.
Here too, the existing system was no longer being developed and had to be replaced. What made it harder was the platform's most valuable asset: an extensive knowledge base of materials from lectures and professional training, which had to be transferred completely and safely.
For a professional platform, that body of material is the product. Any document lost or rendered unfindable during a migration is a piece of value gone for its members, and it can rarely be reconstructed afterwards. At the same time the web presence had aged: system change and relaunch had to be thought through together, not one after the other.
E&P Solutions delivered the complete move to Odoo: the technology and the public face of it, in one project.
- A clean system changeComplete transfer of the knowledge base, with redundancies and duplicate records from the legacy system cleaned up along the way. What was carried over was the content, not its disorder.
- New website in the new corporate designA modern presence with markedly better user guidance, delivered in the same project and on the same platform as the system behind it.
- Expert directoryRestructuring experts from across Austria can be found and contacted directly. That significantly increases the reach of each individual expert and makes the platform immediately more useful to its members.
- Events from one systemEvents, invitations, newsletters and registrations now run centrally through Odoo, with targeted customisation in invoicing and the expert forum. What used to be maintained in several places now has one home.
90 days from contract to go-live, including data migration, customisation and a completely new website. There was no downtime at any point during the changeover: the platform stayed available throughout.
For members, the difference shows in everyday use. Registering for an event takes at most 90 seconds, from opening the page to a completed registration. Behind it sits a clean dataset in a single system, free of duplicates and legacy clutter.
"An excellent partner for system changes. The data migration from our legacy system and the build of the new website were delivered in record time. These gentlemen are competent, fast and reliable."
From greenfield to store opening in 14 days: 10,000 products, not a single spreadsheet
TCH Sports: a sports retailer serving private customers in store as well as companies and clubs. Newly founded, started with two employees.
A greenfield start-up: no legacy system, no accumulated data, no migration, but one hard constraint. The store opening depended directly on the ERP system. Without a working point of sale, without the product range loaded, without compliant processes, there could be no sales.
What was needed was a system doing two things at once: meeting every legal requirement for Austrian retail, including the cash register obligation and daily cash closing, while connecting stock management and in-store sales seamlessly. And not eventually, but by the opening date.
What each day of delay cost was clear from the outset: around 500 euros. Rent and staff costs were already running while no sale was possible without a working system. Not a projection of lost revenue, but fixed costs incurred every single day. That was the benchmark the delivery had to meet.
E&P Solutions built the entire system landscape from the ground up, so that everything worked together from the first day of trading.
- Everything in one systemOdoo Sales, Inventory, Point of Sale, Purchase, CRM and Website, integrated rather than isolated. A sale in the store moves stock without anyone transferring anything.
- Direct supplier integrationThe system is connected to that of a major European sports equipment manufacturer. Reorders match automatically and manual reconciliation of product numbers is eliminated entirely. With a range built on sizes, colours and variants, this is exactly where a two-person business otherwise loses its time.
- Compliant from day oneDaily cash closing in line with Austrian cash register regulations, built in from the start rather than retrofitted.
- 10,000 products from the outsetThe full product range was cleanly loaded in the system for the opening, including variants and availability.
Fully operational 14 days after the contract was signed, in time for the store opening. 10,000 products were available from the first day of trading, and not a single spreadsheet is used anywhere in the business: one system throughout, with no media breaks.
At 500 euros of running fixed costs per day, every day saved paid for itself immediately, not through a payback calculation measured in years, but from opening day onwards.
"E&P Solutions set the system up in record time and gave us every possible support so we could open the store as quickly as possible. The opening depended on the ERP system."
Why parts leave the happy path, and how to see it in your own data
Automotive supplier, Upper Austria: series production of aluminium castings for well-known car manufacturers, three-shift operation. Every part is uniquely traceable from casting onwards via a data matrix code.
Forty to fifty parts are taken out of the process every day: a step was skipped, the code is no longer readable after heat treatment, or the digital quality check passed on a part that was not sound. Three to four groups of causes, each recorded in the code as a rule violation.
The real problem starts afterwards. The rejected semi-finished parts sit on pallets and never find their way back into the production chain: nobody knows reliably which station is the right place to return them to. The shortfall is compensated with weekend shifts. So the question was not "how much scrap do we produce", but: at which points exactly does a part leave the ideal sequence, and what happens to it afterwards?
The data was already there, it simply was not being used: at every station the data matrix code is read and enriched: identifier, start, end, machine and further parameters, stored in the ERP and database system. That provides precisely the three components process mining requires: a case ID, timestamps, and the activity itself.
A full quarter of data from three-shift operation was analysed and visualised with the process mining tool Disco. Before the first reliable analysis, however, came the cleansing: the raw data contained errors originating in the upstream IT systems, and any analysis based on them would have produced a false picture.
- Timestamps do not reflect realityIf incorrectly recorded times are carried forward, the result is distorted, and unnoticeably so, because the analysis still looks plausible.
- Station naming produces a false processActivities were mixed up with workstations, bookings and storage locations. Without cleansing, the analysis would have shown a sequence that does not exist. The underlying IT error was uncovered and identified in the course of the analysis.
- Binding rules rather than a one-off clean-upTo keep data quality from degrading again, a binding data management guideline is part of the work. Otherwise the analysis is unusable again within six months.
What emerged was an accurate picture of the actual production sequence, based on the cleansed process mining data, not the assumed sequence but the one being lived, including every deviation from the target process. From it, a catalogue of measures to reduce the error rate was derived. Parts of it were implemented.
Two results that were not on the original list: the IT error in station naming, which would have misled every subsequent analysis had it gone uncorrected, and the realisation of how far the documented and the actual sequence had drifted apart.
The transferable insight for other manufacturers: the data needed for this kind of analysis almost always already exists. What is missing is rarely a new system: it is data quality, and the willingness to look at the real sequence rather than the documented one.
When the hospital information system logs everything but none of it can be analysed
Breast cancer screening, double reading of mammograms: research conducted at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg campus, funded by the State of Upper Austria. Published at dHealth 2023 by IOS Press, with Andreas Erhard as co-author.
Medical information systems log virtually every action: who opened, reported on or passed along which record, and when. For analysing care pathways this material is nonetheless unusable, because it is not held in a format that process analysis tools can work with.
The question the work set out to answer: how can this log data be prepared so that an analysable process emerges from it, without rebuilding the existing systems?
The team developed a method that automatically converts events from standards-based log repositories (HL7 FHIR AuditEvent) into the two established process analysis formats, XES and OCEL. The reference implementation is written in Java and openly available.
The approach was tested on the double reading process for mammograms from the Austrian breast cancer screening programme, using simulated event data, not patient data from live operations.
From the transformed log data, the care pathway could be reconstructed in full and represented as a process model: from appointment scheduling through arrival, reading and correction loops to the closing conversation with the patient, including the deviations not foreseen in the target sequence.
This demonstrates that existing systems can become a data source for process analysis without being rebuilt. The work is a proof of concept on simulated data; real-world log data brings additional quality challenges, as the authors themselves note.
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