Resin in, good parts out, and kilograms that finally reconcile.
You buy resin by the kilogram and sell parts by the thousand, and somewhere between the hopper and the carton the numbers stop agreeing. Regrind goes back into the machine unrecorded, the machine-hour rate on your quotes was calculated last year, and the mould card is a photocopy of a photocopy. We set Odoo up around the three things this sector actually runs on — the machine, the mould and the material lot — not a generic assembly BOM.
—— Where it hurts
What usually breaks first.
The kilograms never reconcile
A job draws 400 kg of resin and returns good parts, runners, startup scrap and regrind that goes straight back into the hopper with nothing written down. At month-end the resin count is short again, and nobody can say whether the difference is purge waste, short shots or the scale at goods-in. Until scrap and regrind are recorded as materials in their own right, that count can never close.
Quotes priced on last year's machine rate
The machine-hour rate lives in a spreadsheet last updated when electricity was cheaper and resin was two price rises ago. Quoted cycle time is never compared with what the machine actually ran, so the real margin on a job arrives weeks after the truck has left. In this sector cost is the machine and the material — if either number is stale, every quote is a guess.
The mould card is a photocopy of a photocopy
Shot counts, the last service date, which machines a tool actually fits, which moulds belong to which customer — all of it lives on a card in a plastic sleeve, or in the setter's memory. Maintenance happens when parts start flashing, not when the counter says it is due. And when the one person who knows the setup parameters takes leave, every changeover runs long.
A traceability request stops the office
A customer audit asks which resin lot went into a delivery of food-contact packaging shipped in March. The answer exists — spread across paper job travellers, a goods-in book and three spreadsheets — and it takes two days to assemble. If the lot cannot be pinned down precisely, the recall gets wider, and so does the customer's doubt.
—— 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.
Can Odoo cost our jobs by machine hour, not just materials?
Yes. Work centres carry an hourly rate on the routing, work orders record actual run time, and material is consumed by weight at lot level, so a job's cost is machine time plus the resin actually used — including the scrap allowance set on the BOM. The comparison that changes behaviour is quoted cycle time against actual, and once both live in one system that is a report, not a project.
We supply food-contact packaging. Can we trace a resin lot to a delivery?
Yes — lots are recorded at goods-in, consumed on work orders and linked to deliveries, so the upstream and downstream traceability report answers an auditor in minutes rather than days. The honest condition: it only holds if operators scan at the machine, which is why we put shop-floor barcoding in the first phase, not the last.
Can Odoo connect to our injection moulding machines?
Start with tablets at the work centre: operators log cycles, scrap and downtime as they happen, which already replaces the paper traveller. Odoo's IoT box connects scales, label printers and simple counters as standard; a direct machine link over something like OPC-UA is custom work, and we will tell you plainly whether your machines and volumes justify it.
We run on spreadsheets and a standalone accounting program. How does the switch work?
That combination is the normal starting point in this sector, not a special case. We phase it: production, stock and barcoding go live first while your accounting package keeps running, and nothing is switched off until a full month reconciles in both systems. Every phase has a fixed written scope and price, with the same consultant from the first call to 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.