Odoo for Manufacturing: the complete guide by an industrial Odoo partner

A manufacturing order is simply the instruction to make something: this product, this quantity, by this date. The manufacturing app creates them for you when stock runs low, when sales orders come in, or from your production plan.

• Work orders break manufacturing orders into individual steps, so each station knows its job in the final assembly
• Created automatically from stock rules, from sales orders, or from your production plan
• Barcode scanning across the flow: scan a batch or serial number, start and stop the timer on a step, flag a machine problem, move to the next step
• One, two or three-step production — consume and receive in a single move, or add separate picking and storing steps

That last choice sounds like paperwork. It's actually one of the decisions that determines whether your stock numbers still make sense a year from now.

Real factories deviate from the plan. Most systems punish you for it. This one doesn't.

• Editable orders — use a different component than planned, or fix an order even after it's marked finished
• Partial runs — made 60 of the 100? The system closes the 60 and creates a new order for the remaining 40 automatically
• Split and merge manufacturing orders as demand consolidates or fragments
• Unbuild orders — take apart a finished product and put the components back into stock
• Scrap recorded against the order it happened on, instead of disappearing into a stock correction
• Repairs for items under warranty, or repair sold as a service

Component substitution at the order line doesn't break the master bill of materials — which is why the shop floor keeps using the system instead of working around it.

• A clear view of the whole schedule, where you drag an order to move it
• Work center capacity — work is scheduled at each work center based on what it can actually handle
• Material requirements planning — the system reads demand, current stock levels and supplier lead times, then tells you what to make and what to buy
• Step order — an operation can't start until the one before it is done
• Work center downtime — planned shutdowns, holidays and shifts are built into the schedule
• Production plan (the Master Production Schedule) — enter how much you expect to sell each week and the system proposes the rest

Material requirements planning works well for factories making the same things over and over. It gets thin when your scheduling is more complicated than that — more on that in the limits section below.

A bill of materials is the parts list for a product: what goes into it, and how much. Everything else in manufacturing depends on getting these right.

• Multi-level bills of materials — a chair is made of a frame, and that frame has its own bill of materials. As many levels as you need
• One bill of materials for a whole product range, instead of a separate one for every size and color
• Kits — sell a product that ships as a box of parts the customer assembles
• By-products that come out of the same run, each with its own value
• Step sequences that define the order operations happen in
• Lot tracking and serial numbers that follow a part from raw material all the way to the customer who received it

That last point is what gives you full traceability — and it's the part auditors care about.

The Shop Floor module is built for a touchscreen next to a machine, not a desk. It's what turns shop floor control from a clipboard exercise into live production data.

• Workers start, pause and finish their steps by tapping
• They record quantities, scrap and materials used right at the machine
• Instructions and drawings appear on the same screen, so nobody hunts for a printout
• Problems get flagged without leaving the shop floor app
• Time is recorded automatically — planned versus actual
• Production status is visible in real time, to the office and the floor at the same moment

Real time visibility is the part most factories underestimate. When the planner can see production status without walking the line or calling a supervisor, planning stops being a guess. And automatic time recording is what eventually makes your cost numbers believable. If you last looked at this ERP on version 14 or 15, the shop floor module is the piece most worth a second look.

Quality control is its own module here, not a checkbox on a form.

• Quality control points — set exactly where a check must happen: at a step, on a product, on a batch, or when goods arrive
• Types of quality checks — pass/fail, a measurement that has to fall within limits, written instructions, or a photo
• Problem reports with a cause, a corrective action and a person responsible
• Blocking quality checks that physically stop a step from closing until someone passes the check

For food, cosmetics, medical devices and auto parts suppliers, quality management plus lot tracking is your audit trail. Set your quality control points once and every batch inherits them — nobody has to remember.

When you change a product design, three things usually go wrong. The factory keeps building the old version. Nobody knows who approved the change. And the drawing is out of date. Product lifecycle management exists to stop all three.

• Version history on every bill of materials and every step sequence
• Engineering Change Orders — formal change requests that need approval before they reach production
• A side-by-side comparison showing exactly what changed between revisions
• Drawings and documents attached to the change, so they travel with it

If you redesign products often, or engineer something new for each customer, this is the module that keeps your bill of materials trustworthy instead of folklore.

Preventive and breakdown maintenance, tied to the same work centers your production runs on.

• Maintenance requests raised from the floor or from a quality alert
• A maintenance calendar with scheduled preventive servicing
• Statistics on how often machines break and how long repairs take
• Automatic capacity effect — a work center under maintenance disappears from the schedule

That last one is what matters most. Downtime stops being invisible, and maintenance stops competing with production for the same hours.

If you send work out — machining, coating, heat treatment, finishing — there are three ways to handle it.

• Basic subcontracting — the outside company supplies the components as well as the work
• Resupply subcontracting — you send them the components
• Dropship to subcontractor — your supplier ships the components straight to them

For manufacturers who outsource part of the manufacturing process, this is often the feature that decides the whole evaluation. It's also the one most competing systems handle badly.

• Full traceability — trace any batch forward to the customer or backward to the supplier
• Cost reports, including what a production run actually cost and the value of work still in progress
• Cost allocation across work centers, materials and labor, so you know where the money really goes
• Overall equipment effectiveness — how much of a work center's available time actually produced good parts. One number combining availability, speed and quality
• Production analysis and delay reports, so “we're running late” becomes a number
• Allocation reports showing which production is promised to which customer

Equipment effectiveness only means something when the underlying production data is captured automatically, which is exactly what the shop floor module does. Together they replace gut feeling with data driven decisions — and that shift is usually what people actually meant when they said they wanted an ERP.

Measuring devices connect directly through the IoT Box, so a value lands in the system without anyone typing it.

• Scales and calipers writing measurements straight into a quality check
• Barcode scanners for lots, serial numbers and step transitions
• Barcode and label printers triggered from the work order
• Cameras for photo evidence on a quality check

For factories with heavy quality requirements, IoT integration removes the single biggest source of bad production data: people re-entering numbers by hand.

The Odoo ERP for manufacturing argument only pays off when production connects to the rest of the business.

• Inventory across multiple warehouses, with putaway and replenishment rules
• Procurement, with supplier lead times feeding the schedule
• Sales orders and customer records, with configurable product variants
• Accounting with live stock valuation
• Field service for installation and on-site work
• Time tracking on production orders

That's the real difference. Not any single feature — the fact that there is no integration project between these other modules, because they were built as one centralized platform.