What's New in Odoo MRP?

Editor's Notes

• #3: 0:00 - 1:00 (1:00)-Hello! My name is Brett, I am the director of Sales here in San Francisco. Welcome to this talk, “What’s New in Odoo MRP?”-Manufacturing, for anyone who has worked with it in the past, can be a very complicated world to dive into. There’s a lot of ways to manage it. Some companies have big assembly lines following the same precise repetitive process over and over again. Other companies are the exact opposite, doing unique processes with a lot of change and variability from job to job. -Production might be handled by one skilled individual over the course of several days, or it could be managed by a whole department of workers and completed in an hour. There are endless possibilities.-It’s also very critical for an integrated business software like Odoo to analyze how the supply chain impacts manufacturing through sales that drive production, purchasing of components, and shipping and receiving operations. In other words, to have a great manufacturing solution, you also need to consider those related parts in the business.-So we really tried to keep all that in mind, and listen closely to user feedback for Version 14. 
• #4: 1:00 - 2:15 (1:15) -So this year, we decided to really prioritize two big things… making Manufacturing way more flexible, and a lot more efficient. -Flexibility means allowing you a lot more control over how to operate within the app. It’s a combination of removing restrictions that were there before but also making sure that it still actually works and doesn’t break anything. And that’s not always easy to do with an integrated platform like this where a change you make in manufacturing can immediately impact inventory for example. So we actually had to refactor the app in order to accomplish this. -And to be more efficient, we focused a lot on planning. We made some big improvements across the board with the different apps in Odoo so that things like deadlines, forecasting and replenishment are all way more impactful for the user and a lot more sophisticated while still being very user-friendly. You’ll also see that the app is just generally easier to use across the board now. We made a lot of little improvements here and there to allow you to accomplish everything in fewer clicks to get work done faster.-So it’s pretty exciting. And there’s a lot to show, so let’s get right into it.
• #5: 2:15 - 3:15 (1:00)-So I’ll start with one of the biggest improvements to manufacturing that is going to open up a lot of doors for our users. Even if you have the most systematic and clearly-defined manufacturing process in place, there is always the need to have a lot of control over production. Whether you’re building a highly customized product as a one-off job, or you’re fixing a mistake that was made by one of your employees or managers, it’s critical to have as much control as possible over the system, otherwise it can be very frustrating, or it might not work with your specific industry.-So, in order to improve those capabilities in Odoo we needed to actually refactor manufacturing orders themselves. We often refactor existing apps when we release a new version… we refactored invoices and journal entries to combine them last year, and we refactored the Inventory app to make it run faster in version 11. -The frequent refactoring of the source code from version to version is part of why we take so much pride in the product evolution of Odoo as a whole. -So I’ll show you a few key benefits of this new refactoring and how it makes our manufacturing platform more flexible.
• #6: 3:15 - 4:15 (1:00)-Now it is extremely easy to update the quantities of components consumed or quantities of products manufactured in the middle of the process. For example in some distillation processes, or extractions, the end result can be both variable in terms of components or amount produced. -[start] Let’s go ahead and create a manufacturing order. Let’s produce some citrus oil, and I’ll plan on making 300 liters.-According to bill of materials, it wants me to use these components in these quantities, and that’s fine to start so let’s confirm.-And I’ll check availability. But now at any point in the process, I can go ahead and click on a line, and override the quantity to be less or more. Say I’m going to make this batch with less lemon juice than normal. -And I’ll counter it by adding extra preservatives, which is like the opposite of going organic… It will alert you in red if you’re going above the forecasted amount but I’ll talk about that all a bit later.
• #7: 4:15 - 5:00 (0:45)-I want to point out that these changes can also be made after the manufacturing order is completely finished. Sometimes this is necessary to correct a mistake made, but also in many industries you don’t actually know what the specific yield is going to be… -[start] So I’m going to look at this list of old completed MOs, I’ll go into one, and I’m going to hit edit so that we can override the amount we said we produced. Maybe the yield was a little less than expected. And it immediately impacts our product moves as well in inventory right away.That overall relationship between stock moves and manufacturing has become so much stronger and so much less restrictive than in previous versions. So MRP can work great in any situation like this.
• #8: 5:00 - 5:15 (0:15)- On a quick related note, it’s important to state that in the configuration settings you can always prohibit that flexibility if you need to for your users so that only managers have unlocked the MO first. 
• #9: 5:15 - 5:25 (0:10)- And there are settings on the individual BOM level for whether or not flexible consumption is allowed or blocked for users. So overall its more flexible but you still have control as needed. 
• #10: 5:25 - 6:55 (1:30)-So changing quantities is certainly useful, but to go a step further, now you can actually deviate completely from the Bill of Materials or work order operations planned. This is great for any highly customized products where for particular jobs, maybe you’ll remove or add components or some operations in the process. -[start] Let’s go ahead and start this manufacturing order to build a wooden chair for a customer. As you can see from the bill of materials I am expecting to use 4 chair legs, one chair back, and one regular seat. And for work orders I’m planning on doing an assembly operation for 1 hour. -So i’ll go ahead and confirm it. But then let’s say our customer requests that we actually build it using a solid gold seat instead, AND, they want us to paint the legs black to make it look cool. -So now I can actually click “Edit”, and override the quantity to consume for the seat to zero. And I can add a new line for a new component called “Golden Seat.” Nice. One of those.-And for work orders I can go ahead and add a whole new operation for painting, at our painting work center. And because we’re working with precious gold I’m going to take my time and make assembly last 90 minutes instead of an hour. Then I can save and continue on with the process.-The changes I made there are unique to this MO. They don’t permanently change your base Bill of Materials for the wooden chair. But the costing for this specific MO will be accurate and reflect the change.
• #11: 6:55 - 7:25 (0:30)-And so that’s already a lot of control but we were able to give the user even more freedom. -[start] Now, you can even start a manufacturing order without any BOM at all. -I can start a new MO with a new product I create on the fly, and skip the BOM field because its not mandatory. And I can just add some components and confirm it to get started. So it’s actually a really easy way of handling Engineering to Order requirements.
• #12: 7:25 - 8:25 (1:00)- So we were also able to add some new shortcuts and improvements to give you more easy control over the whole manufacturing process.- [click] As you can see, now on your work orders, we have these in-line buttons that will allow you to start, pause, complete or block the work order really easily. -Start begins the timer and puts it in progress -Pause is if you go on a break or go on lunch and want to pause the timer, Done is when you’ve finished the work order and block is if you need to freeze operations on the work center because of some sort of shut down or issue. -Of course if you want you can still get into the full work order control panel by clicking the little mobile icon too.. But depending on your process, you might prefer to just control it all from this screen. and now the option is there to let you handle it however you need. - Another really nice new feature that shows up on this screen is the little information icon... 
• #13: 8:25 - 8:40 (0:15)...And if you click on it, it’s a popover that tells you important scheduling information about when this work order is expected to begin and what it’s waiting on, in this case, it’s waiting on the first work order to be completed. - So its a much better way to manage work orders
• #14: 8:40 - 9:40 (1:00)-And while we’re on the subject of scheduling work orders, we’ve also improved the planning view for work orders. -This view is meant to help you schedule and reschedule your different work orders, [start] and you can move them from one work center to another easily. So one way we’ve improved it, is that we actually show you the availability for your work centers… if it’s grayed out then, the work center isn’t available. If it’s white it’s ok to use at that time.-then if we go into one, we have that same helpful info popover for what is affecting its schedule. -I want to point out as a side note that scheduling in general was a huge area of focus for our whole logistics R&D team this year. We made some big improvements to deadline and scheduled date fields so that they behave more like how people want them to and they do a much better job at reflecting any date changes up and downstream, so now for example, if a Sales Order’s deadline changes, it can reflect that on the manufacturing order it created, for example.
• #15: 9:40 - 10:10 (0:30)-So something that must be highlighted that will maximize efficiency not just in manufacturing, but across sales purchasing and inventory as well is two new features that work together. -We have a new forecasted report that you can view for any product that is very useful in showing the details of a product’s forecasted demand.-And then within operations like a Manufacturing Order, the availability date is directly impacted by the new forecasted report.
• #16: 10:10 - 12:10 (2:00)-[start] So to demonstrate lets create a manufacturing order for this robot which requires some components as well as a subassembly that we will need to build.-As soon as its confirmed, you’ll see this nice new availability date indicator for each line. It’s color coded so that if a line is green, it’s available in stock, we can click to view the forecasted report and we’ll see lines that indicate any allocations for what we have in stock and what will be remaining with specific dates for everything.-If a line is red it means we don’t currently have enough confirmed forecasted stock to meet the demand. Now, you’ll it triggered a draft PO to procure the remaining amount I need, but I still need to confirm the PO. -So I’ll go into the purchasing app, say we’re the purchasing manager now. Go into this new draft PO, and confirm the PO, and you’ll see there are specific planned dates to receive these things based on the component’s settings. The 28th and the 21st, different for each… -And back to manufacturing you’ll see that the availability dates are now orange, which means there are planned stock moves impacting the forecast so I will have them by these specific dates. -And its not just for purchased goods, the forecasted report is something we can see for subassemblies that we’ll build. So here you;ll see this is the pending MO that we need to complete for the subassembly.-I’ll just build that subassembly really fast. And you’ll see it is automatically allocated to the main MO. -So these dynamic availability dates linking to the new forecasted report view will make resource allocation and supply chain needs so much more efficient and easy on the user. Really it’s a massive improvement impacting not just manufacturing, but all of the logistics apps in Odoo.
• #17: 12:10 - 13:20 (1:10)-And there’s another really big change that we made to the platform that is directly related to the relationship between manufacturing and the overall supply chain.-In previous versions, we had an option called “Make to Order” or “Replenish on Order” that would trigger the creation of either a manufacturing order, or a purchase order, as needed whenever there was a demand for the thing based on sales orders or based on production orders.-And that system worked for a lot of situations, but the biggest problem was that it wasn’t very flexible. A very common concern people would have was that if you have 5 of some manufactured good in stock, and then you get a sale for 10 of that thing, Odoo would just try to make you build 10 of that thing and ignore what you already have in stock. -So, we’ve totally overhauled the whole system. We archived the old MTO route type and now the way to handle it is actually with reordering rules, because we’ve added flexibility in the trigger type, and, most importantly it’s all handled instantly in real-time without relying on a scheduler the way it used to.
• #18: 13:20 - 16:00 (2:40)-So let’s take a look. [start] Here’s a product called Fancy Lamp, and we have quantity 10 on hand.-Check the routes and it’s something we manufacture but there’s no option for “make to order” anymore. -Up at the top we click on this reordering rule, and here’s the new way to view it, [pause] you’ll see the trigger is set to “Auto”, and it’s just a minimum rule of zero meaning that if the forecast based on demand takes it below zero [start] it will use the preferred route to replenish it.-So see what happens when we sell this lamp. I’ll go into Sales, and create a new sale order, to a customer that wants 30 lamps. I’ll enter 30 of the lamp and the system alerts me “hey you only have 10 in stock.” And then I’ll confirm the order. The sale is happenin- So now I’m going into the inventory app because I want to show you the delivery order that was generated by the sales order. Here’s the delivery order [pause] and Odoo says we’ve automatically reserved the 10 lamps we have in stock towards the order of 30. But we still need to manufacture 20 more. [start] - But first I’ll jump into the purchase app because the system has automatically triggered the creation of this purchase order [pause] for quantity 20 of a component I’ll need to build more lamps. So, the real-time triggering of events really involves both purchasing of components as well as automatic creation of manufacturing orders too. [start] So I’ll go ahead and confirm the purchase order, and I’ll receive the 20 components in stock real quick. -Ok. So. Now, going into the manufacturing app you’ll see there is a manufacturing order to build the remaining 20 lamps. The new automated replenishment will automatically allocate the components to the order including the 20 components we just received from our purchase order. -So I’ll go ahead and produce. Then back in inventory, go to the delivery, and I can ship it out. All 30 of the lamps… the 10 I already had plus the 20 I just built.-Long story short, Odoo does a great job of automating manufacturing and purchasing for you but it’s also smart enough to consider the stuff you already have in stock and adjust quantities accordingly.
• #19: 16:00 - 16:20 (0:20)-Related to this new way we handle replenishment, we also now have this new replenishment report. Technically you access it in the Inventory app by default, but it’s super-relevant to manufacturing so I wanted to highlight it.-It’s cool because it’s basically Odoo’s way of notifying us whenever we have any product that is expected to be at a negative forecasted quantity. So if you sell something and you don’t actually have it, it’s going to pop up on this replenishment report with detailed info about why you’re being alerted.
• #20: 16:20 - 17:00 (0:40)-It’s all based on the forecast quantity and how it relates to what you currently have on hand. Over at the right here we have some recommended actions to take.-We can just order once, and it will generate a single manufacturing order or purchase order for this product. Or, if you click on the Automate orders button, it will aliso create a new reordering rule for you just like what we were using in the previous example with the lamp. That way you won’t ever have this kind of alert again because you’ll always be replenishing automatically.-The third action we could take is Snooze, which allows us to tell the system not to worry about it. It’s a way for us to retain control over the system.
• #21: 17:00 - 17:25 (0:25)-So moving on, another way we’ve generally improved efficiency that relates to planning is our longterm planning tool, the Master Production Schedule.-Here’s what the Master Production Schedule used to look like back in the previous version. For a single product like Office Chair Black, if you enable all the rows to be visible it would take up a huge chunk of the screen. And each product had its own horizontal scroll functionality, and its own column headers.
• #22: 17:25 - 17:50 (0:25)-So we cleaned it up, quite a lot. Here’s the MPS in V14. Now you have all the same information that will help you plan out your production and procurement in advance... but we’ve consolidated several of the rows, reduced redundancy and in general you can get a lot more quick, easy usability out of the MPS now.
• #23: 17:50 - 18:50 (1:00)-So in addition to all these changes, lastly, I also want to mention something we did that just helps to expand upon the overall functionality. This impacts costing. In Version 14 we have now increased the scope of Odoo’s capabilities to allow landed costs to be applied to manufacturing orders.-So basically, if you’re using FIFO costing and automated inventory valuation to get the most sophisticated real-time automated stock accounting, now you can go back and add additional costs if needed to impact your production costing.-Here’s an example- maybe you’ve completed a manufacturing order but now you want to go back and allocate the cost of some additional packaging charge. [start] here’s a manufacturing order I’ve completed for producing some cans of spam. I made 100 and the total cost is $24335-Ok so I’m going into the inventory app to add a landed cost for an additional packaging charge. -I’ll create one and now in V14 we can choose Manufacturing orders. I’ll choose the MO or multiple MOs I want, add the cost which in this case is a packaging charge, and I will specify the amount. Let’s say $500.-Then I can look at how the valuation has adjusted. It went from $24,335 to $24835…. And that will roll up into accounting as a journal entry in your general ledger too...
• #24: 18:50 - 19:30 (0:40)-There are certainly more improvements and changes but too many to fit into a 20-minute presentation.-The main thing I want people to leave with is that we completely understand that Manufacturing is NOT a one-size-fits-all software need-However… we feel extremely confident in saying that because of the strong amount of control you have throughout the manufacturing process, and because of how efficient it is to work with in terms of both ease of use and everything we’ve done in regards to planning and scheduling... -Odoo is able to meet the requirements of any manufacturer out there.