In 2019 our founder Alex Lee gave a seminar at the Six Sigma Institute in Tsim Sha Tsui on robotic process automation with SugarCRM and Odoo. Looking back at it now is useful, because the argument he made then is the same one we make today, with different tools.
The seminar
The session covered three things that were separately popular at the time: RPA for automating keyboard and mouse work without writing code, SugarCRM for sales and customer management, and Odoo for ERP.
The point was not that any of them was best. It was that none of them solves everything, and the interesting work is in making them talk to each other.
Why that still holds
Seven years on, the tool names have changed. UiPath and n8n do what RPA scripts did, and do it better. AI handles document reading that used to need templates and rules. But the underlying problem has not moved: businesses run on several systems, and the gaps between them are where time gets lost.
The other part of the seminar that has aged well is the methodology. Alex approached integration through Lean and Six Sigma rather than as a purely technical exercise. That means measuring where the waste actually is before automating anything.
It is an unfashionable point. Automating a broken process gives you a broken process that runs faster, and you have now paid for it. Working out what the process should be first is slower to start and much cheaper to finish.
Where we are now
We still work on the same problem: connecting the systems a business already runs so people stop copying data between them. The stack is Odoo, UiPath, n8n and AI document recognition rather than RPA and SugarCRM, but the job is the same.
The original seminar listing is here: Robotic Process Automation with SugarCRM and Odoo
If your systems do not talk to each other and someone is paying the price in manual work, get in touch.
