On the surface, Odoo (formerly OpenERP) and eucalyptus trees don’t appear to have much in common. But in the Democratic Republic of Congo there were important partners and Xpansa (now VentorTech) has made the union happened.
In the D.R.C., wood is a central source of energy. A single province, North Kivu consumes 3.000,000 square meters of wood per year to produce the charcoal necessary to produce heat needed in every home and provide electricity. Unfortunately, wood is poached from national, regional and local parks negatively affecting wildlife and the environment.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) created the Ecomakala program to save trees specifically in the Virunga National Park. The goals of the program are stated below:
- Support for plantations growing eucalyptus trees as a crop.
- Reduce poaching of naturally growing trees and other foliage in parks.
- Stimulate economic development and agricultural growth through subsidized farming.
To accomplish this, the WWF approached XPANSA (now VentorTech) for IT infrastructure support for the program. Specifically XPANSA was asked to build a solution for:
- Tracking planter and plantation activities
- Maintaining a database of tree nurseries
- Tree growth recording
- Managing subsidy payments to planters
- Generating regular reporting to European Union program funding sources.
Through process investigation, VentorTech generated a solution with Odoo as the wireframe.VentorTech felt that standard functionality with a custom agricultural overlay would best serve the program. Our suggestion was based on the following factors:
- WWF preferred an open source solution.
- Future modules would be easy to build and integrate.
- WWF was looking for the lowest cost of implementation and support.
After integration, our Odoo solution was able to eliminate transactional records that were previously paper-based. Paper-based solutions were particularly problematic for the program because of geographic distance, slow reporting times and national or regional government change and outbreaks of civil unrest.
Using client-server architecture and an Internet based solution from XPANSA (now VentorTech) allowed the program to actively track and manage over 4 million square meters of eucalyptus within the program while rapidly increasing reporting times and budget controls.
The World Wide Fund for Nature is thrilled with the results and we are obviously very proud to be a part of such an important project.
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