Baraja: Auto-driving Into the Future With Odoo

The Company

Founded in 2016, Baraja is a trailblazing start-up that invented Spectrum-Scan™ LiDAR, a new model of LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology for self-driving cars. The pioneering company’s founders, Federico Collarte and Cibby Pulikkaseril leveraged simple laws of physics (refraction of light on a glass prism) and revolutionized the autonomous vehicles industry by solving long-existing problems of conventional LiDARs; costs, safety, and scalability. They ingeniously integrated components from the automotive and telecommunications supply chain and became one of the few LiDAR producers in the world that commit to stringent quality control, reliability, and capability for mass production.

Baraja is currently growing offices in Sydney, Shanghai, and Silicon Valley, and foresees to touch base across the world.

Exponential Growth with Odoo

Baraja adopted Odoo as the central engine of its system with two simple aims, to improve operational efficiency and to attain a clear and consistent 360-degree view of its business processes. Federico and Cibby invested all major resources in Odoo as they highly valued the software compatibility and flexibility with their unique business model. Baraja powered itself with a quick-start success pack and smoothly systemized its operations in two short months with solid implementation and tailor-made customizations (Purchase, Inventory, Manufacturing, PLM, Sales, Invoicing, Accounting, and Studio). With relentless determination, the company became a successful example of exponential growth by expanding from 9 to 96 employees in just two years!

Federico Collarte, Co-founder and CEO at Baraja

Building Successful Partnerships

The co-founders recognized that it takes successful partnerships to build a successful business and soon reached out to one of Australia’s top Odoo partners, Havi Technology. The company surpassed major milestones in R&D processes with Odoo’s manufacturing applications (Manufacturing, PLM, Quality, and Maintenance) and Havi Technology’s active support. The co-founders were thoroughly inspired by their partner and created an in-house Odoo team to test upgrades and customizations for future developments. But their dedication doesn’t stop there! They still continue to work closely with Odoo functional consultants in growing their knowledge in ERP functions and Odoo applications.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And if you want to go fast and far, go with Odoo!”

An All-inclusive Solution

Since Odoo is an open-source software, Baraja was able to make customizations and solve a wide scope of business-specific problems; inventory, purchasing, invoicing and especially manufacturing. 

Purchasing management is the first and most crucial process in Baraja, as they have to frequently procure multiple types of components to produce and develop their LiDAR model. Thanks to the automation and integration of Odoo’s Purchase, Inventory and Invoicing apps, Baraja’s employees are able to spend minimal time in administrative tasks such as scanning, recording, and evaluating stocks, while the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology converts vendor bills and payments from paper to digital in just a matter of seconds!

As a technology manufacturing company, Baraja’s operations highly depend on technical and time efficiency. The company’s experience with Odoo has only been improving as processes are even faster and more fluid upon each new software update. After the migration from Odoo 12 to 13, Baraja was able to save a significant amount of time, 20 minutes per hour, in its manufacturing process as workarounds weren’t required anymore in the swapping of components. This saved the company 240AUD per week and a remarkable 80% reduction in time. In the meantime, Baraja looks forward to accelerating towards greater global expansion after the release of Odoo 14, 15, and more to come!

"Every minute matters in manufacturing, and so far we were able to save a significant amount of time and costs that we couldn’t have been possible without Odoo.”

Huabing Liu, Team lead of IT operations at Baraja.