High-mix, low-volume, and every job quoted from a drawing.
No two POs look alike in a job shop: fifty stainless flanges this month, a one-off fixture in 7075 the next, and every one quoted fresh from a drawing. The estimate comes from the material price of the day and someone's feel for cycle time, and whether the job actually made money surfaces weeks after it ships. We start there — a shop that knows its true cost per job can trust everything else the system says.
—— Where it hurts
What usually breaks first.
Quoted on feel, costed at the invoice
An RFQ arrives as a PDF drawing and a STEP file, and the price comes from today's material cost plus someone's memory of a similar job. Actual setup and run hours never flow back into the estimate, so the shop keeps winning exactly the jobs it underpriced. Which ones those were only shows up when — if — someone reconciles the hours against the invoice.
The traveler and the rev that changed mid-job
The traveler is a printout that follows the parts, so the drawing revision on it is whatever was current the day it was printed. When the customer issues rev D halfway through, the machine keeps cutting rev C until someone remembers to walk out and swap the sheet. A finished batch to the wrong rev is an expensive way to find a document-control gap.
Outside operations are a black hole
Heat treat, anodising and plating happen at somebody else's factory, and the moment a batch leaves your dock it disappears from every system you have. The subcontract PO lives in purchasing, the job lives on the floor, and nothing links the two. So "where is order 4712?" gets answered by phoning the plater.
Bar in, remnants back, a count that never matches
Material arrives as six-metre bars and full sheets, gets consumed as cut lengths, and the offcuts go back on the rack without a booking. The stock count drifts within a week — and when a customer audit asks for the mill cert behind a delivered part, the answer is an hour in a filing cabinet. Traceability by folder holds up right until the day it matters.
—— 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.
We cost per job, not per product. Does Odoo fit how we cost?
Yes. Each manufacturing order carries its own material, labour and subcontract cost, so a one-off fixture and a repeat batch are costed the same way: actuals against the estimate. Operators book time at the machine, so quoted-versus-actual is visible per job instead of dissolving into a monthly average — and that comparison is what makes the next quote better than the last.
Our customers require material traceability — heat numbers, mill certs, first-article reports. Can Odoo handle that?
Every receipt of material is tracked as a lot, with the mill cert attached the day the goods arrive. From a delivered part you trace back through the work order to the exact bar and its cert in a few clicks, and quality checks — including first-article steps — sit on the routing itself. The audit trail is built as the work happens, not reconstructed the week before the audit.
Can Odoo connect to our CNC machines?
Start with what pays back first: shop-floor terminals at each machine, where operators start jobs, log quantities and flag scrap — that alone replaces the paper traveler. Direct machine signals such as part counters or run states can be added through Odoo's IoT support or the API where the machine exposes them. Any machine integration is scoped as its own written phase, so you never pay for connectivity you are not using.
We run the shop on Excel and an old job-shop package. How do we migrate without stopping the machines?
In phases, with the old system running alongside until the numbers match. Customers, materials, open jobs and open POs move in validated batches you sign off, and one full cycle — quote to delivery to invoice — must agree in both systems before anything old is switched off. The machines never stop for the migration, and the fixed written scope for each phase says exactly what moves when.
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.