Trace a lot from supplier to shelf in minutes, not a lost weekend.
In a food plant the BOM is a recipe, the yield moves batch to batch, and every pallet carries a date that is quietly counting down. When a customer complaint or an audit asks where one raw-material lot went, the answer has to come out of the system in minutes — not out of a weekend spent with paper batch records. That is the standard we implement to, because it is the standard your auditors and your biggest buyers already hold you to.
—— Where it hurts
What usually breaks first.
Recipes are not static BOMs
A recipe scales with batch size, loses weight to cooking and evaporation, and gets adjusted on the line when an ingredient runs short. A fixed BOM assumes none of that, so the costing sheet in Excel and what the line actually consumed drift further apart every month. Unless yield and substitutions are recorded per batch, where they happen, your margin per SKU is a guess.
The recall drill takes a weekend, not twenty minutes
A supplier flags a problem with one raw-material lot, and someone spends days with delivery notes, paper batch sheets and dispatch records working out which finished lots contain it and which customers received them. In Odoo, with lots scanned at receipt, at consumption and at dispatch, that same question is one traceability report. The only condition is that the scanning actually happens on the floor — so we design the flows around that.
FEFO on paper, write-offs in practice
The warehouse picks the nearest pallet, and the near-expiry stock turns up at the back of the racking during a count — after it is too late to sell. Big retail buyers reject anything under the agreed remaining shelf life, so short-dated goods come back at your cost. When every lot carries its expiry date and removal is set to FEFO, the system chooses the right pallet instead of relying on whoever is driving the forklift.
The stock count never matches the batch record
You buy in kilograms, produce in litres and sell in cases, while QC samples, line start-up losses and give-away weight never get booked anywhere. So the physical count and the system disagree, and everyone goes back to trusting the clipboard. Recording consumption against each production order — with unit conversions and scrap logged as it occurs — is what makes the two numbers meet again.
—— 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.
Ingredient prices move weekly and we cost by batch — which costing method fits?
Most food plants run FIFO or average costing (AVCO) on raw materials, and Odoo sets this per product category. Each batch is costed from the actual consumption recorded on its production order, so the figure reflects that batch's real yield and substitutions — not a standard sheet from last quarter. We agree the method with your accountant before any data moves, because changing it later is far more painful.
Can we trace both directions — from a supplier lot to customers, and back?
Yes — Odoo's traceability report runs both ways: from a raw-material lot down to every customer delivery that contains it, and from a finished lot back to its suppliers. The condition is that lots are captured at receipt, at consumption and at dispatch, so we design the barcode flows to be faster than not scanning. That discipline is what makes the report trustworthy on the day you actually need it.
Can Odoo connect to our scales, label printers and line machines?
Scales and label printers connect through Odoo's IoT framework — a weight captured at receiving writes straight to the receipt line, and lot labels print at the workstation. For line machinery the honest answer is: it depends on whether the machine exposes a documented interface, and we will tell you before quoting, not after. We start with the workflows, then connect devices in a later phase, each with a fixed written scope.
We run production on spreadsheets and a separate accounting program. Can we migrate without stopping the line?
Yes — in phases, and without a big-bang cutover. Recipes, open lots and balances move in validated batches, and the spreadsheets and old accounting program keep running alongside Odoo until a full cycle — raw-material receipt through to dispatched order — matches in both. You work with the same consultant from the first call to go-live, in Thai or English.
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.