Every board a serial, every reel a lot, every question answerable.
A PCBA order is a few hundred line items before the first board is placed: a BOM that revises mid-run, reels with date codes, alternates approved by one customer and banned by another. And when the recall question comes — which serials used that reel — the answer lives in paper travelers and three spreadsheets. We implement Odoo for assembly operations where that answer has to take minutes, not days.
—— Where it hurts
What usually breaks first.
The BOM on the line is not the BOM you quoted
Revision C is running on the floor, the customer emailed revision D last week, and purchasing bought parts against B. Approved alternates live in email threads, so the same position gets built with whichever MPN the storeroom found first. One missed ECO and a whole batch is rework — or scrap.
The recall question takes three days to answer
A supplier flags a bad date code, and the customer asks which shipped serials contain it. The trail runs from a receiving label through paper travelers to a test-station log that only exports to Excel. Until reels are lots and boards are serials in one system, that answer is an archaeology project.
Sourcing is a race the spreadsheet always loses
One controller has a 30-week lead time, its approved alternate has a 5,000-piece MOQ, and the broker's quote expires Friday. Purchasing juggles distributor quotes in a spreadsheet, so nobody sees that a kit is short until the line is set up to run it. The shortage was knowable the day the order was confirmed — nothing connected the BOM, the stock and the quotes to say so.
The passive count never matches the shelf
Backflush says 10,000 resistors were consumed; the feeder attrition, the splice losses and the rejects say otherwise. Partial reels come back to the storeroom uncounted, so the system's on-hand drifts a little further from reality every run. Then a kit the ERP swore was complete stops the line.
—— Modules
The modules this sector actually starts with.
—— How the rollout runs
A sector template, tuned to how you actually work.
Walk the process
We follow one real order end to end — quote to cash, or purchase to pay — before touching a configuration screen.
Configure the sector baseline
The modules this sector starts with go in first, configured against your master data rather than demo records.
Pilot with one team
One site, one team, one month. The pilot decides what scales, and its objections reshape the template before anything else ships.
Scale and hand over
Remaining sites onboard on a fixed rhythm, each with documentation and a trained super-user of its own.
—— FAQ
Questions teams ask about this service.
Component prices swing wildly — which costing method fits PCBA?
FIFO with actual costs, usually. A shortage buy at eight times the contract price should hit the margin of the boards it was bought for, not be averaged away into next quarter — FIFO tied to lots does exactly that, and landed costs pick up the freight on urgent air shipments. We configure this per component category and walk your accountant through the postings before go-live.
Can Odoo trace a suspect reel to the serials we shipped?
Yes. Reels come in as lots, finished boards get serials at final assembly or test, and consumption on each work order links the two. The built-in traceability report walks both directions — from a date code to every affected serial, or from a returned board back to its reels. The real discipline is scanning at consumption, and that is a barcode-and-training question we design into the floor process from the start.
Can Odoo talk to our pick-and-place machines and test stations?
Placement programs stay in the machine vendor's software — that is where that job belongs. Odoo's role is everything around the machines: work orders and consumption captured at each workcenter by barcode or tablet, and results from ICT or functional test posted through the API as quality checks against the serial. Any machine integration is scoped as its own written phase, so you know the cost before anything gets built.
We run on Excel BOMs and an old MRP. How does the switch work?
Your BOMs move first — imported with revisions and approved alternates, then checked line by line against what the floor actually builds, because that is where the differences surface. The old system keeps running until at least one product has gone order-to-ship in both and the counts agree. Every phase has a fixed written scope, and the consultant from your first call stays through go-live.
Let's find out whether Odoo actually fits your business.
A short call, an honest answer. If it isn't the right system for you, we'll say so.