Case Study: Portugal Government streamlines national teacher allocation and halves IT costs with Odoo

Portugal's annual school teacher allocation handled by open source ERP

Portugal’s Directorate‑General for School Administration, part of the Ministry of Education and Science, manages Portugal’s annual teacher-to-school allocation — a highly visible, complex process that involves teachers, trade unions and multiple government organisations and must handle almost all teachers applying in the same week. The department was hampered by fragmentation across about 150 legacy applications and needed a scalable, maintainable system to coordinate allocations and related HR processes.

Working with Think Open Solutions, the department implemented Odoo, an open‑source ERP, to replace those disparate systems (including HR, recruitment and teacher evaluation). The unified platform became the largest Odoo deployment by concurrent users, halved the department’s required budget by eliminating proprietary licences and extensive support contracts, reduced maintenance to a small team of Odoo developers, and proved faster than most previous custom applications.

Portugal Government