28 titles, one platform, self-billing included

Publishing is a trade with processes that no standard ERP knows. An ad order is tied to a title, an issue, a position, and a closing date. A freelancer doesn't invoice, you invoice on their behalf. That can't be modeled away with an extra field.

Our client is a publisher with 28 brands, built up through multiple acquisitions. Each acquisition brought its own system landscape, and each of those landscapes had its own way of handling ad sales and billing to external content suppliers.

The starting point

After a number of acquisitions, several Odoo and non-Odoo environments existed side by side, each with its own history for the title it housed. Ad sales per issue, position, and closing date were still tracked manually in some environments.

Self-billing for freelance authors and photographers ran through a workaround outside the system. Each title had its own way of working, which made every environment merger a search for exactly what had been arranged differently where.

What was built

We merged the environments into a single Odoo platform for all 28 brands, while preserving the title-specific administration that publishing requires. Ad sales is modeled around title, issue, position, and closing date instead of a generic product model.

Reverse billing for freelancers has become a fixed part of the purchasing process instead of an exception running outside it. New titles or future acquisitions can be connected to the same platform instead of setting up yet another separate system.

Self-billing as the rule, not the exception

A freelance author or photographer doesn't send an invoice; the platform issues it on the publisher's behalf, the moment the work is delivered and approved. That doesn't just save administration for the supplier.

It also gives the publisher immediate visibility into what external content is outstanding per title, something that was previously almost impossible to oversee with 28 brands and just as many freelance networks.

Why it stayed on time and on budget

The project was delivered within the agreed timeline and the agreed budget. That's not a given in ERP land, especially not when merging multiple existing environments at the same time.

An ERP transformation is rarely an IT project. It requires close collaboration between the business, the process owners, and the implementation team, people who know how the work really flows and are willing to look at it critically. The commitment of the team on the client's side contributed significantly to the result. An implementation partner can carry such a project, but not alone.

This also included ongoing attention to user adoption, not as a closing training but throughout the entire project, per title and per editorial team that was used to working with a slightly different process.

What it delivered

28 brands now run in one environment instead of a collection of separate systems from just as many acquisitions. Ad sales and reverse billing run as a fixed process, no longer as a workaround alongside the system.

On top of that, there's simply less risk with a future acquisition. Connecting a new title is a matter of configuring it within the existing platform, not adding yet another system.

The most important thing may be what no longer happens: no more manual workaround for self-billing, and no more collection of separate systems that need to be maintained individually after every acquisition.