Making Manufacturing as Easy as Playing Legos! - Roadmap Odoo 17

Mathieu Germain: 0:01

With Odoo 17, actually, we have completely redesigned that interface. We have redesigned it so much that we even made a specific module for it, and we are calling it the shop floor. And so it keeps all of the same functionalities that we had before. So we don't lose any of that. But on top of that, we added quite a lot of additional functionalities.

Olivier Colson: 0:21

Hi Odooers, and welcome back for another episode teasing Odoo 17 new features. Today we take you behind the scenes of our upcoming features. Loved by users, our manufacturing suite changed manufacturers' way of working. To discuss this, I have the pleasure of welcoming Mathieu Germain, product owner of our suite. Whether you work in the manufacturing industry or you are an enthusiastic Odoo user, this episode is for you. Ready? Let's make it. Hello, Mathieu.

Mathieu Germain: 0:50

Hello, Olivier.

Olivier Colson: 0:51

Today is a scary episode. It must be our Halloween special. You know, because we are talking about MRP today, and MRP is a very, very scary thing for a lot of people. Uh, so first of all, maybe could you explain what it stands for? What is exactly, and why is it so scary?

Mathieu Germain: 1:10

All right. Well, in theory, MRP stands for material requirements planning. And so basically, if you are a manufacturing business, it's a tool that helps you plan how much you should buy or produce and when you should do these things in order to meet your customer orders on time. Um, typically, a final product, a finished product, can be made up of a lot of different parts. Um, typically, it's much more complex than we can think of. Um, and so it becomes essential for most manufacturing businesses to rely on such a tool in order to be able to carry on with their production, of course, at ease.

Olivier Colson: 1:50

So let's take a very simple and very original example. Let's say I'm making tables, okay? And let's follow all the steps actually involved in the MRP flow, uh, with, with this example and explain every time maybe, well, how it works, of course. And what changes in the new version of Odoo are needed for these steps of the flow? So okay, we'll skip the R&D part. Okay. Let's, let's, let's say I know how to build my table okay. And then I have some customer interested in it. And I think that's where the story starts right. Indeed. And how does it go then.

Mathieu Germain: 2:27

All right. So yeah if we consider a typical flow, let's say you make a sale Once the customer agrees, at least from the manufacturing perspective, what we will have is a list of, uh, different, uh, manufacturing orders that we have to treat in order of priority.

Olivier Colson: 2:49

So every table you need to make is a manufacturing order.

Mathieu Germain: 2:51

That's it.

Olivier Colson: 2:52

Okay. Okay. And so, uh, how do you handle them? Uh, what what what is physically there to do that? So I guess someone's job is to treat manufacturing orders. Otherwise. Otherwise, it's weird.

Mathieu Germain: 3:04

Indeed. Indeed. Typically you will have a production manager who looks at the assign it to different people in the, in the manufacturing facility. Um, and if you look at the list of manufacturing orders, a very useful tool before that is what we call the component status, uh, column. And so basically this component status column, it tells you, first of all, if all of the components that you need to produce your table are in stock and ready to be used, um.

Olivier Colson: 3:36

Because indeed my table is made of multiple legs, uh, screws, whatever, and So and maybe other things, who knows. So maybe all those components, you don't have them in stock like right away. And you only have some of them and need to wait for the others to, come from your suppliers, these kind of things.

Mathieu Germain: 3:55

Exactly. And this is where MRP is great because it takes care of all of these And this component status column, actually, it's quite handy as well because it tells you whether things are available not available and whether components have been ordered and whether they are expected to arrive on on time or late. And actually, with Odoo 17, we are expanding on this, uh, concept with a brand new report for every manufacturing order, which we call the MO overview, which stands for Manufacturing Order Overview. And the most useful thing that it brings among many new features is that for a specific manufacturing order, if you have a components that are missing, it will highlight the ones that are missing. It will also highlight exactly how much are missing for this specific manufacturing order, based on what you have already in stock. And finally, it will also give you the possibility to order these missing components directly from the report and follow the replenishment, as we call it. Uh, from the. As well. So let's say you create a purchase order for these missing components. You can access the purchase order straight away.

Olivier Colson: 5:06

Let's say you ask your supplier for additional pieces if you order them from

Mathieu Germain: 5:11

Exactly. But there are also some parts that you could produce in-house, for And so in that case, you could decide to create a manufacturing order instead. And you can, from that report, also launch a manufacturing order for these components. So it's totally flexible and very visual because you have everything in one report.

Olivier Colson: 5:27

The idea being to give all this information at one single place, because you of venues to do. Exactly.

Mathieu Germain: 5:35

So before you had to go, uh, through every, uh, line on the, the manufacturing everything manually so it's much faster, uh, and.

Olivier Colson: 5:47

It tells you everything you want. Maybe not everything, but a lot of the things you had to deduce yourself. Exactly. Okay, cool. And then what happens? So let's say I received everything I needed. And so the table is ready to be made.

Mathieu Germain: 6:00

What happens? All right, so now that all of the parts are in-house, you need to backend view of, of uh, of uh, a manufacturing order in Odoo, which is basically a form with a lot of information such as the schedule, date of the manufacturing order, the responsible, um, very many different information.

Olivier Colson: 6:24

Because you need to organize all that, and maybe you have priorities between quickly. And another one can wait a little more, and you have to organize that. Exactly.

Mathieu Germain: 6:36

So all of this is managed in the backend via this form. But if you think about it and if you are a manufacturing operator, actually what you want, and if, as you said before, you know how to build your table, you might want just a simple tool to know what you need to produce, how much. And then just once you've done it, just, you know, a tool to record. Exactly. And so that's why with, uh, Odoo 17, we are bringing, uh, manufacturing to the barcode application, uh, in Odoo. So, uh, just a small background about the barcode application. So far, it's been used mainly for warehouse operators to know which components, which products, they had to move from one location to the other so that they could be packed and shipped, uh, to the customers. It was very handy because it was designed to be a mobile interface so that.

Olivier Colson: 7:24

Everyone can visualize it. Could you maybe explain how it would work without having the barcodes? So barcodes is you scan the barcode. Yeah. On the things you need to to handle. And without it what do you need to do?

Mathieu Germain: 7:36

Um, without the, the, the, the barcodes, you would have to rely, as, uh, I manufacturing.

Olivier Colson: 7:44

Uh, so you would need the screen. Go on your on it yourself and code everything by hand every time.

Mathieu Germain: 7:49

Exactly. You need to be in front of a computer and have that list of components But if you are mobile in your, uh, manufacturing facility, uh, then you might want something that, uh, is slightly more, uh, uh, portable.

Olivier Colson: 8:02

And essentially, here it's just a beep and it fills the thing for you.

Mathieu Germain: 8:06

That's it. And actually, uh, there is also a mode of the, uh, barcode interface components, uh, by, uh, doing a plus or minus, uh, on your screen. And so it can either be used with barcodes, sharing the same functionalities as the current, uh, barcode application for, uh, typical warehouse transfers. But it can also just be used as a simple way to register components and a final product for your different, uh, manufacturers.

Olivier Colson: 8:33

So then you, you, you say yourself, okay, I've taken four legs from my table. I've taken, I don't know, ten screws. That's it. Why not in this other thing. Okay. That's done. That's it. Okay okay. So very simple thing, very simple. And it can be more complex than that. Right. Because I mean, so here we, we're taking, we are taking the example of a very simple table. But let's make it a bit more complicated okay? Let's say my table is using some kind of electronic device in it. I don't know. It is connected to ChatGPT to do whatever thing it is doing because it's a very trendy table. And so there is some AI running on it. There is a lot of electronics in it, and of course, you need to produce that. But then I guess you will need to be able to add some, I don't know, some checks while you're building it because, well, if it takes, I don't know, half an hour or one hour to build one table and you have a lot of electronics to plug in, cables to put everywhere, you would like to check that. What you first said in the table is right. And maybe you I don't know, you have some button to press and check that a little, uh, light is flashing or whatever. Can you have this flexibility?

Mathieu Germain: 9:39

Of course. Uh, so in production, it can be, uh, much more complex than that. And in, in that case, Odoo also have, has, has you covered. So far we have what we call the tablet view in Odoo. And so in this case, instead of creating, uh, one, uh, manufacturing order with components to consume, etcetera, uh, we will instead treat it more like a project. If you want, you will have for every product that you build. Let's say a table is made up of an assembly operation and then a painting operation you will receive. Instead of one manufacturing order, you will receive one task to do an assembly process and then one task to do a painting, a job. And this is easy to set up in Odoo, but typically these are done in sequence. And when you have finished the assembly process, only then does the painting job become available. Um, and so in these, in these jobs, just as you described before, you can add all of these checks, you know, you can add, uh, instruction, you can add documents, you know, that, uh, your employees can visualize to know exactly how something should be built. Um, and then you can add a quality check so that, uh, you know, they make sure to respect exactly the way it should be built.

Olivier Colson: 10:50

And so all this is optional. So you can have like the basic mode as we just explained before. And you can set up all these, these steps and add some yourself, I guess depending on what you're doing, it's super flexible.

Mathieu Germain: 11:00

So you can either just uh, share a PDF, a document so that they have like, um, Or you can give them step-by-step instructions and make it mandatory for them to complete these steps in order to register their production.

Olivier Colson: 11:15

And so then they have to validate each of these steps one after the other, say,

Mathieu Germain: 11:21

Exactly, exactly. Um, and with Odoo 17, actually, uh, we have completely redesigned that interface. We have redesigned it so much that we even made a specific, uh, module for it, and we are calling it the shop floor. Um, and so it keeps all of the same functionalities that we had before, so we don't lose any of that. But on top of that, we added, uh, quite a lot of additional functionalities. Um, so from that, uh, shop floor, uh, application, it's now, for instance, uh, very easy to have an overview of, uh, the manufacturing orders, which we didn't have in the previous tablet view. And if you consider the tasks themselves, it's quite easy to move them from one workstation to the other. It's quite, uh, it's much, much more flexible from an employee, uh, perspective as well, to log in, log out, work on various, uh.

Olivier Colson: 12:12

Because indeed, uh, when you're in a bigger factory for your tables, again, you the same time. And so you will need multiple tablets like that, multiple people working on it. And so then you will need this kind of flexibility.

Mathieu Germain: 12:29

Exactly. Yeah. And so I think this tool will not only be a great addition for and user-friendly experience to go through these manufacturing orders. But it will also be great for the production managers who are at the shop floor level and want to have a live overview of the manufacturing order itself, who is working on the operation of the production order. And number three, you know, how much time have they spent on it? Should I add an operation because the client requested a change and.

Olivier Colson: 12:58

Monitoring and see what is maybe inefficient and improve that.

Mathieu Germain: 13:02

In the future? Yeah, exactly. I'll just keep track of your facility because, as People are working in different stations around the facility, and you might want to have a tool that can oversee that.

Olivier Colson: 13:13

Yeah. After when your business starts to grow a little bit, it becomes difficult And indeed, you need metrics actually to monitor all that. Okay. So we've covered a lot of things on the way the work was organized actually, and the way the tables were made. So now they are ready. No problem. But there's actually an additional thing we didn't talk about. So maybe at some point in my table-making process, I need to use some machinery. And these machinery are not, I don't know, immortal and eternal. You know, I'm a developer. I know what I'm saying. And so you need to maintain them somehow. So maintenance, as you mentioned in the beginning, is part of the MRP flow. Could you explain how it works and what kind of flexibility and functionalities you need for that?

Mathieu Germain: 14:03

Indeed. Uh, so, uh, as you said, uh, very, very well, the maintenance aspect of And so the way it works is that, um, well, the worst thing that can happen, uh, for you as a production manager, is that one of the machines that you rely on to produce, uh, let's say, uh, to cut the, the tabletop or the table legs suddenly dies. And so the way to avoid that is to make sure that these machines are maintained in time. Uh, usually there is a maintenance frequency that you want to apply. Um, it's like with the.

Olivier Colson: 14:39

Car, actually.

Mathieu Germain: 14:39

Exactly. You just want to make sure that, uh, it's well taken care of and that And so the maintenance module is designed exactly for that. Uh, and so typically, uh, we have two types of maintenance. We have a corrective maintenance. So let's say a machine does get broken during production. The operator can very quickly. Do a maintenance request, and the maintenance responsible is notified directly. But in the other case, you can also, uh, really, uh, well arrange your, uh, preventive maintenance. Maintenance, uh, to make sure that, uh, this does not happen.

Olivier Colson: 15:11

So, like, every six months, you, you say I want someone to go and check that That's it.

Mathieu Germain: 15:17

Yeah. That's it. Just. Just like a car. And with Odoo 17, we have expanded on, uh, this recurrent maintenance aspect. And so we've made it much more simpler to set up. And also the way we designed it is that is that now it's also possible to do several maintenance, several recurrent maintenance types for a specific equipment or a work center, because we are now also bringing the maintenance to the work centers, uh, whereas before it was only available for specific equipment. So those are two different concepts.

Olivier Colson: 15:51

What difference exactly does that mean?

Mathieu Germain: 15:52

So basically a work center is a production area. You can also it production area in your in your manufacturing facility. And equipment is like a tool that you will use within that production area. So we differentiate the two when a manufacturing order is planned, typically it's planned on the work center. So it's planned on a machine that can operate, uh, you know, following a specific schedule. And the reason why we are bringing the maintenance to the work center is because we wanted a way to be able to notify when maintenance would be done on a specific work center so that the planning of those work orders could take that into account. So let's say that next week, the machine is going to be maintained from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.. Well, we already know that because this was planned, uh, a long time ago. And so when we planned the manufacturing orders, well, we knew we knew that those three hours were not available. And so either we planned it on another equivalent machine, or we planned it a bit later. But at least we know. And we take that into account to know when we are going.

Olivier Colson: 16:56

So you don't want people to come to work and, uh, suddenly just discover, oh, Oh, but too, too bad. Let's just wait for three hours that the maintenance is done. Okay, sure. All right. Um, and so once the maintenance is done. So I think we have the whole making process of everything. But there might be an extra step, actually, because, I don't know, maybe there is some kind of special warranty on my table. And if ChatGPT doesn't connect well to it, the customer might want to return it to me and ask for some repairs on it. And, uh, and then I will need to take care of that. And this is also handled by your scope. Everything is handled by the scope. It's it's crazy. Yeah.

Mathieu Germain: 17:36

Yeah, the scope is quite broad. Uh, um, at Odoo, um, and indeed so the final piece of the puzzle, uh, if you can call it like that, is the repairs module. So here it's more to handle the after-sales service. So now you have produced you have made sure that you have produced on time. Thanks to all of the mechanisms that we've discussed before. But now let's say a customer has an issue with their device or simply they want to replace a specific part. Well, we can keep track of that in Odoo quite well as well with the repairs module. Um, historically, the repairs module so far has been quite simple and Odoo. We didn't spend that much focus on it for the past several years.

Olivier Colson: 18:16

But you needed more functionality.

Mathieu Germain: 18:18

Exactly. So we this year, we really wanted to make it a true, uh, MRP module. And so for that, we made it much, much more closely how it works compared to like a manufacturing module or inventory module. And so what I mean by that is that now it's completely integrated with the forecasting and replenishment mechanisms that we have within the logistics apps of Odoo. Okay. I'll give you an example. Yeah. Um, let's say that, uh, you have a repair order in a week, and, uh, the client indicated that, uh, they want a specific, uh, battery, uh, to be, uh, inserted or you indicate that, well, if you don't have that in stock, Odoo will notify, uh, the replenishment, uh, responsible, uh, that something is needed for that repair order. Okay. And then, uh, it will just.

Olivier Colson: 19:05

Like it would have done with some manufacturing.

Mathieu Germain: 19:07

Order. It works exactly the same way. It integrates, uh, within the forecast model. And so, uh, it's a much more it just makes the whole MRP suite much more robust.

Olivier Colson: 19:15

And it streamlines all the flows as well, because you have one simple way of doesn't work like that. You need to do it and go to that other screen and click there and do that. Uh, everything with the same objects. Exactly. Yeah. Cool. Cool, indeed. Uh, okay. Something interesting that you mentioned to me as well because, yeah, we prepared this episode a little bit before, uh, was also the, the, the, the fact that you can reuse some components of something you repair. Right?

Mathieu Germain: 19:45

Indeed. Uh, so that's one of the new features of repair, um, in version 17 as of, uh, of interacting with the repair, uh, components you either specified. You are adding a component or you are removing a component. Um, and now we are introducing a new method which is called the recycle method. So let's if we take the example of, uh, the table, the table of.

Olivier Colson: 20:10

Course, always the table.

Mathieu Germain: 20:12

Exactly. The the the the the the the famous table. Um, imagine um, let's take a very simple example. Let's say one of the legs is broken and you want to replace it. Right? But you notice that actually that, uh, that leg, it has a small scratch and you can very easily, uh, just rework it a little bit and then reuse it in another manufacturing order. So instead of sending, uh, this, uh, component to the scrap location, you know, instead of removing it completely from your stock, you can select this recycle type and it will go to the location you choose in that repair.

Olivier Colson: 20:46

So you still replace the leg, I guess, because the customer is in a hurry and But you keep the old one and you fix it so that you can reuse it.

Mathieu Germain: 20:54

Exactly. Basically, that's that's exactly it. Yeah.

Olivier Colson: 20:56

Okay. Okay. And so it is doable now, you know. Exactly.

Mathieu Germain: 20:58

Yeah. It's a request we've had for some time as well. And so uh, uh, we are quite happy to, to introduce it.

Olivier Colson: 21:04

One more new feature coming into the congratulations. Uh, all right, uh, we are reaching the end of the episode. So, uh, as a conclusion, as always, with the roadmap episode, I would like to get some, you know, some secrets. Top secret information about the future. Uh, what can you tell us about what is coming after Odoo 17? Do you have already big plans of things you would like to improve in the suit?

Mathieu Germain: 21:27

Of course, so, first of all, uh, before, um, uh, we go on to other topics, uh, of Odoo 17. So we want to improve on these features. We think there's still a lot of work to be done on all of those topics I shared with you today, um, while also making it more user friendly. You mentioned at the beginning that can be quite a scary, uh, topic. Um, and, um, and so we are still going to invest a lot of time also in trying to make it, uh, more simple to use, more simple to.

Olivier Colson: 22:02

As non-scary as possible.

Mathieu Germain: 22:03

Exactly, exactly. So we'll we'll definitely spend some energy on, on on that. And then I think that, um, maybe I'll share just two, uh, two topics that are particularly interesting to me. Um, I think the planning, um, could be improved, uh, also in the future. And it's definitely something we want, uh, to, to, to spend some time on in the, in the near future.

Olivier Colson: 22:25

Because as we say, I think, uh, anything related to planning, uh, in, in those

Mathieu Germain: 22:32

Exactly. I mean, here, uh, we describe a simple flow, but so much can go wrong, Uh, parts that you've ordered can come, come late, and then you want to reshuffle the order of the manufacturing order, uh, priority. And so here, in terms of short term, you know, shop floor level, uh, planning, I think more options, more flexibility can be offered to the customer. And then also, in terms of planning, I think longer-term planning, which we haven't discussed today, but it typically is something that is done using the master production schedule in Odoo, where you can forecast in the next months, next weeks. Uh, what, uh, you think customers are going to order? Uh, I think this is a tool that is heavily relied on by a lot of manufacturing companies, and I think it's something that we could spend some time improving as well, and perhaps even explore how it can fit in even better with the other planning and, uh, replenishment mechanisms in Odoo. And perhaps finally, uh, just an application we did not mention, uh, today, which is the PLM app, which stands for Product Lifecycle management. Okay. What is it's, uh, it's basically, uh, an app that allows you to manage the versioning of your products. Okay. So typically a product will have a certain, uh, recipe, a, a bill of material, as we call it, uh, in Odoo today. And perhaps you want to maintain that bill of material over time as you are improving the quality.

Olivier Colson: 23:52

Because there is a new version of the legs for my table that doesn't get So you can.

Mathieu Germain: 23:59

Replace the legs of a brushless, uh, type of leg, for instance. And um, and then you will, you know, have a new version in Odoo currently, um, new versions. Uh, I, I mean, currently, um, we only maintain one version at a time. Uh, in Odoo, I think perhaps, uh, something could be explored. More flexibility in that. Maybe, maybe on on on that topic. So I'll just say that for now. Okay. And, uh.

Olivier Colson: 24:20

It's just a teaser for now, so you can say whatever you want and people will see Uh, uh, okay. So that gives us a lot of interesting, uh, I don't know, ideas for, for the future and things for you and your team will have to work on, uh, good luck with that. Uh, so hopefully this whole episode, uh, made the MRP less scary for people. I think you managed to sell it quite well, quite frankly. Thank you for your answers and see you next time.

Mathieu Germain: 24:50

Thank you, Olivier. See you next time.

Olivier Colson: 24:51

And that brings us to the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed the sneak peek of the suite. If you're eager to explore further the exciting. Offerings for Odoo 17, mark your calendars for our grand in-house event. Odoo experience taking place next November. And if you're in the mood for more captivating content, I highly recommend checking out our episode about Inventory's new features. Until next time. Cheers!