Manufacturing is not something any business wants to take on half-heartedly. Ensuring that your products are being created within your business's quality and quantity needs is complicated, yet essential. The coordination of materials, work centers, labor, scheduling, and quality control can quickly overwhelm even experienced operations teams. Thankfully, the hard work of managing those processes can be made much easier through the use of the Odoo Manufacturing app!
What the Manufacturing App Does for You
Odoo's Manufacturing app is your ideal solution to keep track of your company's entire manufacturing process and ensures you meet your manufacturing goals. Within the app, there is functionality for keeping track of bills of materials for manufactured products, the assembly processes themselves, the manufacturing stations and their capabilities, and building reports from all that manufacturing data.
Whether you're assembling electronics, fabricating custom parts, producing food and beverage products, or managing complex multi-stage production runs, Odoo Manufacturing brings structure and visibility to your entire operation. It connects seamlessly with Inventory for material availability, Sales for make-to-order workflows, and Accounting for accurate cost tracking. Afterall, why split up your processes into different apps when they can all natively integrate?
Bills of Materials: The Foundation of Production
The basics of the Manufacturing app start with the bill of materials (BOM), which is a list of everything needed to build a new unit of a product to track stock and costs. But Odoo takes this further than a simple ingredient list. You can create:
- Multi-level BOMs for products that contain sub-assemblies
- Alternative BOMs for different production methods or material substitutions
- Flexible BOMs that adapt based on product variants (size, color, configuration)
- Version control to track changes over time and maintain production consistency
Each BOM can specify operations, work centers, quality checks, and even attach instructions or diagrams for operators. This means your manufacturing orders come with everything needed to execute the first time correctly.
Tracking Every Step of Production
In addition to bills of materials, the app can track the manufacturing steps from obtaining the materials to the finished product with its serial number, as well as the cost of materials and operating work centers for every product that you manufacture. Beyond the materials used to produce something, the app can also help you track scrap and by-products created during manufacturing.
This granular tracking provides several key advantages:
- Full traceability: If a customer reports an issue, you can trace that serial number back through every component, lot, and operation
- Accurate costing: Real-time capture of material consumption and labor hours means you know your true production costs
- Waste management: Understanding scrap patterns helps you improve processes and reduce costs
- By-product handling: Co-products and by-products are captured and can be automatically added back to inventory or sold
Managing Your Production Floor
Managing a business's manufacturing work floor and work centers is one of the greatest strengths of the Manufacturing app. Work centers in the app can be configured with their operating costs, hours, and capabilities, which can then be referenced when scheduling manufacturing jobs to them.
Think of work centers as the heart of your shop floor. Each one represents a machine, workstation, or production line. You can define:
- Capacity and efficiency: How many hours is this work center available? What's its actual output rate?
- Operating costs: Hourly rates for labor, machine time, and overhead allocation
- Capabilities: Which operations can this work center perform? Does it require specific skills or certifications?
- Maintenance windows: Block out time for scheduled maintenance to avoid over-scheduling
When you create manufacturing orders, Odoo intelligently schedules operations to available work centers based on these parameters. You get realistic timelines and can spot bottlenecks before they cause delays.
The Master Production Schedule
The master production schedule serves as a centralized view of a business's forecasted manufacturing demand, and can be used for manually planning manufacturing and purchase orders. This planning tool helps you balance supply and demand across weeks or months, accounting for:
- Confirmed sales orders that need fulfillment
- Forecasted demand from historical trends
- Current inventory levels and incoming stock
- Lead times for purchasing materials
- Available production capacity
The result? You can proactively plan material purchases, adjust staffing levels, and communicate realistic delivery dates to customers, all before orders hit the shop floor.
Shop Floor Control in Real Time
The Shop Floor companion module can be used for live tracking of manufacturing orders assigned to work centers and progress on those orders. Operators can:
- View their queue of work orders on a tablet or workstation screen.
- Start and stop operations to capture actual time.
- Record quantities produced and report quality issues.
- Request materials or flag blockers in real time.
- Check instructions, drawings, or video guides inline.
Supervisors get a live dashboard showing which work centers are active, idle, or blocked, making it easy to reallocate resources and keep production flowing.
A Day in the Life with Odoo Manufacturing
Imagine a small electronics manufacturer that assembles custom circuit boards. A sales order comes in for 500 units of a specific model. The Sales app triggers a manufacturing order, which pulls the BOM with 47 components and six operations.
The planner reviews the master production schedule and sees that materials for three components are running low. The system suggests triggering purchase orders, which the planner approves with a click. Those POs flow to Purchasing, and the supplier confirms delivery in five days.
When materials arrive, the production order becomes ready. It's scheduled across three work centers: SMT placement, wave soldering, and final testing. Operators on the shop floor see the order appear in their queue. They scan components to confirm the right parts, complete each operation, and flag two units that failed testing.
Quality receives an alert, investigates, finds a calibration issue, and documents the fix. The 498 passing units are marked as finished, receive serial numbers, and move to inventory. Accounting sees the real cost, materials consumed, labor hours, and allocated overhead. The Sales team gets a notification that the order is ready to ship.
Quality Control Integration
Odoo Manufacturing works hand-in-hand with the Quality app to embed inspections into your production flow:
- At component receipt: Verify incoming materials meet specifications.
- During production: Check dimensions, tolerances, or other critical attributes at specific operations.
- After completion: Final inspection before products move to inventory.
Failed checks can trigger alerts, rework orders, or scrapping, and all of it is documented for compliance and continuous improvement.
Who Gets the Most Value?
- Discrete manufacturers producing electronics, machinery, furniture, or assembled products.
- Process manufacturers in food and beverage, chemicals, or cosmetics with batch production and by-products.
- Make-to-order operations require tight integration between sales, engineering, and production.
- Job shops handling custom or low-volume runs with frequent changeovers.
- Growing manufacturers are ready to move beyond spreadsheets and paper travelers.
Why It Works So Well with the Rest of Odoo
Manufacturing doesn't operate in isolation. When you connect it with Inventory for material requirements planning, Sales for make-to-order triggers, Purchase for supplier coordination, Quality for compliance, and Accounting for true cost tracking, you eliminate manual data entry and gain end-to-end visibility. Your team runs on a single system, from quote to quality check to cash.
Core Features of Odoo Manufacturing:
- Bills of Materials (BOM): Multi-level, versioned BOMs with variants and alternatives
- Manufacturing Orders: Create from sales orders, forecasts, or manually; track progress in real-time
- Work Centers: Define capacity, costs, and capabilities for intelligent scheduling
- Operations & Routings: Multi-step production processes with instructions and quality checks
- Master Production Schedule: Forecast-driven planning for materials and capacity
- Shop Floor Module: Operator-friendly interface for work order execution
- Serial & Lot Tracking: Full traceability from components to finished goods
- Scrap & By-product Management: Capture waste and co-products automatically
- Quality Integration: Embed inspections at any point in the production flow
- Work Order Tablet View: Touch-friendly interface for the production floor
- Subcontracting: Send components to external manufacturers and track returns
- Maintenance Integration: Link work center downtime to maintenance schedules
- Reporting & Analytics: Production analysis, efficiency rates, and cost breakdowns
Ready to see it in action?
Having advanced tools that you can utilize for your business can do wonders for improving your workflow efficiency, and Odoo is a full suite of advanced business tools. The Odoo Manufacturing app is only one of these tools that you can take advantage of. Reach out to your local Odoo partner (like we are here at Lighthouse IT Solutions), and we can show you a hands-on demonstration of everything Odoo has to offer.