Odoo 18 Enterprise Book : Manufacturing

5. Settings

By going to the Manufacturing module’s Configuration menu then choosing the Settings option, you may modify the system to match your manufacturing procedures. Enabling Work Orders for thorough task management, using the Master Production Schedule (MPS) for planning, and keeping track of By-Products in bills of materials are important choices. Work Centers may be set up with efficiency parameters, Subcontracting can be configured, and product variations can be managed. To improve total production efficiency, further capabilities include Quality Management, Manufacturing Order Management, Allocation Reports as well as Security Lead Time options can be configured as per the requirement.

Work Orders: Enabling Work Orders allows you to break down the manufacturing process into detailed, manageable tasks assigned to specific work centers. This feature supports better scheduling, tracking, and execution of operations on the shop floor.

Work Order Dependencies: This feature allows you to define the sequence in which work orders should be executed within a manufacturing process. To enable it, activate the ‘Operation Dependencies’ option in the Miscellaneous tab of each Bill of Materials (BoM), as illustrated in the screenshot below.

Shop Floor: The Shop Floor feature enables you to manage and execute manufacturing orders directly from the dedicated Shop Floor app. It offers a user-friendly interface optimized for tablets and touchscreens, allowing operators to view assigned tasks, track progress, and complete work orders in real time, improving on-the-floor visibility and efficiency.

You can open the shop floor by clicking on the ‘Open Shop Floor’ button from a Work Order configuration form or using a ‘Shop Floor’ smart button of a manufacturing order configuration form. While choosing a work center for the station, you can install the shop floor app using the ‘Install App’ button, as depicted in the screenshot below.

After proceeding with the installation, choose a work center, and you can manage the work orders and other operations in the Shop Floor interface, as depicted in the screenshot below

Timer: When enabled, the Timer displays a stopwatch on the work order screen. This helps operators track the time spent on each task, providing more accurate production time logging and supporting performance monitoring and time-based analysis.

To check the feature, click on the ‘Open Shop Floor’ button from a work order form. You can see the timer running under a work order, as illustrated in the screenshot below.

Barcode Nomenclature: This setting defines how barcodes are interpreted by the system. It determines the format (nomenclature) of scanned barcodes for different documents like manufacturing orders, operations, and products. Custom barcode rules can be configured to ensure compatibility with your workflows.

The Default Nomenclature offers a pre-configured set of barcode rules to identify standard document types and operations, which can be customized as needed. With the Print Barcode Commands and Operation Types feature, you can generate barcodes for actions like start or pause and place them on workstations for quick scanning. Additionally, the Print Barcode Demo Sheet provides sample barcodes for training, testing, or configuring barcode scanners in your manufacturing setup.

Master Production Schedule (MPS): The MPS helps with production planning by allowing you to forecast demand and plan manufacturing quantities over a specific time horizon. This tool provides a visual, time-based grid to anticipate production needs and align them with resource availability.

By-Products: Activating By-Products allows you to define secondary products that are generated during a manufacturing process in the Bill of Materials (BoM). This is useful for industries where waste or reusable materials are created as part of the main production, as depicted in the screenshot below.

Work Centers With the Work Centers link, you can configure the physical or logical locations where operations take place. You can also define parameters such as capacity, efficiency, and time tracking to ensure optimal resource utilization. From this window, you can manage and create new Work Centers.

Subcontracting: The Subcontracting option enables you to outsource specific manufacturing operations to third-party vendors. You can track subcontracted work, manage incoming components, and monitor delivery of finished goods.

Quality: Enabling the Quality option allows integration with the Quality module, helping you define quality control points, inspection steps, and alert systems. This ensures compliance and consistency throughout the production process.

To check the feature, open a Shop Floor and click on the small settings icon from the particular Work Order station. This will open a menu list where you can choose the ‘Create a Quality Alert’ option to create any quality alerts when any product quality issue arrives.

Then, you can provide the quality alerts by providing a quality issue Title, Product, Product Variant, Lot, Work Center, Picking, Team, Priority, Root Cause etc, as illustrated below.

Then, you can provide any description regarding the quality issue in the ‘Description’ tab, any Corrective Actions, Preventive Actions, and any other Miscellaneous details regarding the Vendor, Date Assigned, etc, in the relevant tab sections, as you can see from the above screenshot.

Manufacturing Order Management: This function provides options to automate and streamline the creation, tracking, and processing of Manufacturing Orders (MOs), ensuring visibility and control across all stages of production.

Allocation Reports for Manufacturing Order provide visibility into how materials are allocated to different manufacturing orders. This helps in identifying shortages or surpluses and improves inventory planning.

Security Lead Time adds buffer time to manufacturing operations to account for unexpected delays. This ensures that production deadlines are met even when disruptions occur.

Each of these settings can be enabled or configured according to your specific operational needs, allowing Odoo to adapt seamlessly to your manufacturing workflows.

6.1 Work Centers

Work Centers are the core of production activities, serving as dedicated spaces or units where manufacturing processes occur. The Odoo 18 Manufacturing module allows users to create and manage multiple work centers, ensuring that every production activity is assigned a proper space. This feature helps ensure quality at each stage of production.

To set up a new work center, navigate to the settings window and activate the Work Orders option. After activation, the work center setup link becomes accessible, displaying existing work centers and their configurations.

In the ‘Work Centers’ window of the ‘Configuration’, you can see the dashboard of all the available work centers with their Name, Code, Tag, Alternative Work Centers, Cost per hour, Capacity, and other details, as depicted in the screenshot below.

To create a new work center for your company, click on the ‘New’ button and proceed by filling in the required fields, including the unique ‘Work Center Name.’ The ‘Tags’ aid in classifying and arranging work centers for simpler filtering. You can choose a backup center in the ‘Alternative Work Center’ field to maintain operations in the event that the primary center is unavailable.

For the purpose of indicating its availability, every work center also has a distinct ‘Code’ and set ‘Working Hours’. You can also input Cost per Hour, Setup Time, and Cleanup Time; all crucial for precisely estimating production costs as well as establishing ‘OEE Targets’ (Overall Equipment Effectiveness targets) to monitor efficiency and select the ‘Capacity’ (number of things it can manufacture concurrently).

Odoo 18's Manufacturing module allows for the assignment of an ‘Expense Account’ to each work center, ensuring accurate tracking of costs like labor, machine usage, setup, and maintenance. The 'Analytic Distribution' button allows for precise allocation of expenses across departments, projects, or cost centers, enhancing cost control and profitability analysis. Using the ‘Add a Line’ button from the pop-up window, you can mention the Projects, Departments, and the analytic Distribution Percentages, as depicted in the screenshot below.

You can specify the employees responsible for or permitted to access a particular work center in the ‘Allowed Employees’ field. Additionally, any relevant information or notes about the work center can be added in the ‘Description’ section.

The Specific Capacity setting in a work center defines the default number of units that can be produced simultaneously during a single production cycle. This value serves as a general benchmark for the work center’s output capability. However, if a work center is capable of handling different production capacities depending on the product, you can configure this by navigating to the Specific Capacities tab.

Here, you can set customized capacity values for individual products, allowing for more accurate planning and resource allocation based on the unique production requirements of each item by clicking on the ‘Add a line’ button, as depicted in the screenshot below.

The ‘Equipment’ tab allows users to assign specific equipment to a work center and track each item's costs and productivity individually. When you click on the ‘Add a line’ button inside the tab, you can add any equipment from the list of all available equipment.

Within the Equipment tab, you can view detailed information about each item, including the Equipment Name, the Technician responsible for its upkeep, its Category, and key performance indicators such as MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery), and the Estimated Next Failure date, as shown in the screenshot below.

This functionality supports better maintenance planning, minimizes downtime, and improves equipment reliability.

The Maintenance tab allows you to define key maintenance details for a work center. In the Effective Date field, you can set the start date of the work center’s operation. You can then specify the Maintenance Team and the responsible Technician assigned to handle maintenance tasks. Additionally, you can enter the Expected Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), a manually defined metric that estimates the average time the equipment is expected to function before failing. This helps in planning maintenance schedules and improving overall equipment reliability and performance.

You can automate particular tasks by integrating IoT devices with a work center using the ‘IoT Triggers’ tab. This tab allows you to specify the action that the device should do when activated, define the device to be triggered, and input the appropriate key for device authentication. For increased efficiency, this permits smooth communication between linked hardware and production processes.

After entering all the necessary information, users can save the new work center, adding it to the list of available centers.

Then the work center form’s smart buttons provide easy access to key operational insights, including scheduled operations, Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), productivity losses, work center load, and work order performance. By clicking the Overall Equipment Effectiveness button, you can generate a performance analysis report that evaluates employee costs, task duration, user performance, and loss reasons.

The Productivity Loss button displays reports on productivity impacts caused by factors like equipment failure or reduced speed. The Loads button compares actual work order completion times with planned timelines, giving insights into work center capacity. Lastly, the Performance button lets you access the performance analysis report for work orders assigned to the specific work center. Finally, the ‘Maintenance’ smart button will show the maintenance operations related to this particular work center.

6.2 Operations

The ‘Operations’ are the production procedures established by the Odoo software. Effective coordination of these operations across different work centers ensures that high-quality products are efficiently produced for clients. Setting up and managing operations in the manufacturing module can be done through the Configuration menu or by enabling it in the settings menu.

After opening the ‘Operations’ menu, you can see the dashboard of all the available operations with their respective Name, Bill of Material, Work Center, Duration Computation, Duration in Minutes, and Instructions.

To quickly check the instructions of any operation, simply click on the ‘Show Instructions’ (three lines) icon, as depicted in the screenshot below.

You can open an entry by clicking on an operation column to get a detailed view of the operations in a form view. Filters, Group By, and Favorites features are available to help you navigate and customize the display according to your needs. Let’s now discuss how to create a similar function in the Odoo ERP's manufacturing module,

After opening a new Operation creation form, you will need to add key information such as the Operation Name, Bill of Materials, and Work Center. These details are then linked to different Duration Computations, which can either be manually defined or automatically calculated based on tracked time.

Then, you can set the Default Duration for the operation in the designated field and specify any Product Variants that should automatically undergo this operation by entering them in the Apply on Variants field, as shown in the screenshot below.

Finally, you can refer to the worksheet under the Worksheet tab, which could be a Text document, Google Slide, or PDF. This section also allows for a brief explanation of the procedure in a Description field. Once completed, click the save button to include the newly created operation in the list of existing operations. This is the standard method of creating operations in the manufacturing module.

Then, you can add any instructions to the operations as per your company policies by clicking on the ‘Show Instructions’ icon provided inside the operation’s column from the dashboard.

The Title field is used to enter clear, detailed instructions that guide the operator through the task. Eg: "Check components of the product." The Products field specifies which product(s) the step relates to, helping identify involved components or finished goods. The Operation Types field links the step to a particular type of operation such as Manufacturing or Subcontracting. The Work Order Operation field connects the step to a specific operation within a routing, like Welding or Assembly. The Company field indicates which company the step is configured for, especially useful in multi-company environments.

The Responsible field assigns accountability to a specific individual who will perform or oversee the step. The ‘Step Document’ field allows you to customize or choose a specific page of the operation worksheet to explain the instruction steps for this particular operation. For quality control, the Control per field sets the basis (Unit, Batch, or Time), while the Control Frequency field determines how often this control occurs; for example, checking every 10 units. The Type field classifies the step’s nature, such as Instruction for guidelines, Check for validations, Picture for image-based tasks, or Measure for recording metrics like temperature or pressure. Lastly, the Team field assigns a responsible work center or quality team to handle the step, ensuring accountability and structured execution.

Next, you can add detailed notes or instructions for complex operation steps in the Instructions tab. Use the Message If Failure tab to specify contact information, such as responsible users or email addresses, to be notified in case of an operation failure or a product-related issue. Additionally, the Notes tab can be used to include any extra information or remarks related to the steps or the overall operation.

After saving all the details, you can access the dashboard of completed operations or steps linked to this specific step through a smart button, based on the associated work order operation's name. In this example, a Quality Checks smart button is displayed because the work order operation is set to Quality Checking.