How a multi-entity engineering firm runs its entire bid-to-delivery workflow on Odoo: RFP pipeline, project delivery, time and cost tracking, documents and HR.
related companies unified in one Odoo database
in continuous production use, live since 2020
engineering projects tracked at once, concept to sign-off
contacts consolidated into one CRM
The client is a multi-entity professional engineering, planning and design-build consulting group, operated as four related companies that share staff, systems and back-office operations under one roof.
Most of the firm's new work starts as a competitive proposal: a public-sector Request for Proposals (RFP) issued by a municipality, school board, housing corporation or government agency.
That model is common across engineering, architecture, environmental consulting and planning firms. It is also poorly served by off-the-shelf tools, which are built around either a sales pipeline or a delivery pipeline, rarely both connected end to end with cost and time tracking in between.
Odoo was deployed as one multi-company system spanning all four entities, with each core module reconfigured around the realities of RFP-driven engineering work instead of left in its generic default state.
Custom stages take an opportunity from first notice of an RFP through research, proposal writing, estimate drafting and internal review, submission and award.
Every card carries the submission deadline, any mandatory site-visit date and the internal review date: the three dates that govern a bid team's week, visible without opening the record.
Projects move through percentage-complete stages, so the stage alone tells the team where the work sits between design and sign-off. Budgeted versus actual hours are flagged on each project card, so overruns are visible immediately instead of at invoicing.
Plus On hold and Cancelled buckets.
Time is logged against the specific proposal or delivery task and feeds the budget versus actual view. A dedicated bucket for proposal-writing labor keeps business development time separate from billable hours instead of disappearing into overhead.
Bid expenses such as printing, courier, bid-portal fees and association dues are tagged to the proposal, giving a clear cost per bid instead of a rough guess.
Quotations are generated from the winning CRM opportunity, keeping a clean audit trail from first contact to signed contract.
One document structure holds HR records, contracts, and finance and legal files, shared correctly across all four entities. HR departments mirror the four legal entities, with recruiting, appraisals and time off in the same system.
Instead of customer support, Helpdesk became the firm's internal ticket queue for system changes, access requests and day-to-day Odoo administration, giving the operations backlog the same visibility and priority as client work.
team members running the full operation on one platform
projects tracked per employee at any given time
internal tasks logged under the firm's bid and proposal desk
documents centrally indexed and access-controlled
delivery stages giving real-time visibility from concept to sign-off
internal operations tickets tracked alongside client work
"One system now covers the entire lifecycle of a bid, from the day an RFP is posted to the day the invoice is paid, with no handoff between disconnected tools."
Any firm that wins work through competitive or public-sector proposals has this problem: a bid pipeline that doesn't behave like a sales pipeline, delivery work that needs percentage-complete visibility instead of a flat task list, and costs that must trace back to the bid or project that created them.
No custom development. Everything here is standard Odoo (CRM, Project, Timesheets, Expenses, Accounting and Documents) configured with custom pipeline stages, cost tagging and cross-linked modules. That keeps implementation cost and ongoing maintenance low.
No. This implementation uses standard Odoo CRM, Project, Timesheets, Expenses, Accounting and Documents. The RFP pipeline, delivery stages and cost tracking are built through configuration, not custom code, which keeps maintenance simple.
Yes. Odoo's multi-company setup lets related businesses share one database, one contact list and one document structure, while keeping their own records, departments and reporting separate where it matters.
The firm has run its operations on this implementation since 2020: six years of continuous use across proposal management, project delivery and internal operations.
No. Any professional-services firm that wins work through competitive bids or RFPs, including architecture, environmental consulting and planning practices, faces the same pipeline, delivery and cost-tracking problem.
