Company name: mute-labs
Location: Germany
Industry: Manufacturing
Established: 2018
Company size: 50+
Odoo users: <50
Hosting type: Odoo.sh
Apps: Contacts, CRM, Sales, Accounting, Inventory, Purchase, Helpdesk, Marketing Automation, Odoo Studio
Implementation Partner: much consulting
mute-labs was founded in Berlin in 2018 and is dedicated to making quiet, focused workspaces accessible to everyone. By offering soundproof phone and meeting booths that combine high-quality craftsmanship, minimalist design, and affordable prices, mute-labs makes privacy in the workplace accessible to every team.
Loud conversations, clacking keyboards, or that one colleague’s piercing laughter – modern offices are full of distractions. Quiet areas for focused work are often hard to find. Overall, 49% of employees report that they find the ambient noise level in their offices unpleasant. The problem: Soundproofing solutions like acoustic booths for the office are often expensive and complicated to install.
mute-labs founder Conradin Castell set out to solve exactly this problem and struck a chord. With its two brands, Berlin Acoustics and mute-labs, the company has earned the trust of over 5,000 customers across Europe. The company grew and grew. Many processes and software solutions were the result of “learning by doing.” Once the company had reached a certain level of maturity, it was clear: a different solution was needed.
The problem – a noisy system
In fast-growing companies, processes aren’t always planned. Solutions are frequently implemented on an ad hoc basis, and once they work, they’re left untouched. This is how mute-labs ended up with a patchwork of software solutions. The individual solutions worked in their respective areas, such as CRM, invoicing, or inventory management, but there was no overarching view. “These tools helped us move forward quickly and were easy to use, but they weren’t connected to each other,” notes the mute-labs team.
With so many isolated solutions, reporting is also scattered across different silos. To gain an overview of how the business is performing, information must first be collected and then consolidated into Excel spreadsheets. Real-time analytics look different. As the complexity of business processes increased, so did the risk of losing track of the big picture.
“We had no single source of truth [...], and we realized that our IT infrastructure would soon become a hindrance.” With this realization, the company set out to find an IT solution that could support its growth objectives.
Why Odoo was the right ERP for professional and scalable processes:
All-in-One: Odoo provides all the necessary modules a manufacturing company needs, from CRM to shipping. This eliminates the need for interfaces and makes additional software (and licensing costs) unnecessary.
Value for money and fair pricing policy: Odoo beat out the competition from Dynamics 365 and NetSuite thanks to its clear pricing structure – one price per user, with all apps included.
Low maintenance costs: Out of the box, Odoo offers a range of features that cover many processes. This eliminates the need for time-consuming customizations and special programming – and thus saves costs in the long run.
Low-noise implementation
mute-labs is able to offer its booths at such competitive prices because the company relies on minimalist design, direct sales, and extremely smart project management in production. These project management skills also helped them with the integration of Odoo. For the implementation of the new software, they appointed two internal project managers who worked with the operational teams to define requirements and draw up a plan.
With consulting support from much. Consulting GmbH, mute-labs began implementing Odoo in 2022. They were surprised at how accessible the process turned out to be. “Implementing Odoo is feasible even for people without technical or programming skills.”
Step by step, the old ad-hoc solutions were phased out and replaced with a comprehensive system. First, the sales, finance, and supply chain processes were mapped out in the new software. A wide range of customization options allowed mute-labs to tailor the software to best support its own workflows – without any coding knowledge whatsoever. Once the system had been successfully implemented here, mute-labs decided to optimize additional processes with Odoo and expanded its use to marketing and customer service. Here, they benefit from Odoo’s pricing model, which charges only for users – all apps are included and available at the click of a button at no additional cost.
Stay focused at work with Odoo
The result of the transformation was a single, integrated system capable of mapping the entire business process at mute-labs. The implementation of Odoo had an immediate impact on productivity and efficiency across various departments:
Sales and CRM: 80 % increase in productivity thanks to clearly structured pipelines, a unified customer database, and real-time reporting. Odoo makes the sales team’s work easier, allowing them to now focus fully on customer service.
Production Planning and Inventory Management: Odoo replaces Excel files and Slack messages, providing clear visibility across the entire production chain. In its core process, mute-labs has observed efficiency gains of 80%–100%.
Reporting: mute-labs saves up to 60% of its time here. Odoo provides a unified data foundation that can generate real-time reports with just a few clicks. The view under the hood is now faster and more precise.
In addition to the tangible efficiency gains, mute-labs also noticed a cultural side effect:
“Odoo fosters a culture of practical solutions [...] Teams are engaged and enthusiastic when it comes to suggesting ways to optimize our processes and database setup, because they can see how quickly we can implement changes.”
