Global manufacturing production is to see a projected growth of 4% in 2022 and is expected to will reach a value of $44.5 trillion. As the manufacturing industry flourishes the need for centralized control mechanisms to enable effective, productive, and streamlined operations are imperative to business success. As manufacturing companies continue to face regulatory and environmental fluctuations as well as innovations in technology, the pressure for all departments and processes such as materials sourcing, inventory, procurement, order management, sales, accounting, invoicing, and human resource management need to be optimized and automated to enable high-level practices and ensure visibility across the entire supply chain.
An unknown fact is that today manufacturing companies account for the largest user base of Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP software to effectively manage all facets of the production process and break down siloed departments.
Leveraging an ERP such as Odoo and employing its open source methodologies, customizable features, and highly scalable integrated application framework can help enable flexibility, agility, transparency, and speed to drive business success. Before we dive deeper into how Odoo can simplify complex manufacturing processes, let’s take a quick look at the challenges faced by the industry.
Challenges in Manufacturing Industry
From inventory to production, and order management to finance, the manufacturing industry is prone to immense amounts of data ranging from materials collection and inventory to order processing and client data. It is vital that you digitize manual processes, optimize workflows, and adapt to outcome-based models supported by automation and intelligent integration systems, especially if you intend to maintain operational success and business growth. Here are some challenges the manufacturing industry may face when lacking an ERP system.
Forecasting Demand: This is a fundamental tool used to avoid under or overproduction. It calculates the ideal supply rate and resource allocation in line with customer demand and behavior to minimize expenditures. However, it can be challenging to accurately calculate the actual demand per month or year and predict trends to better plan production and distribution owing to volatile and unpredictable market fluctuations.
Managing Inventory: Manufacturers that take on mass production are commonly faced with large amounts of inventory. Keeping up-to-date records of inventory coming in can be challenging and is a time, resource-consuming process, especially if you were doing it manually, which could in turn affect ROI caused by data errors, stocking shortages, and lack of data-based decision making. Data accuracy and up-to-date inventory management are critical to production capacity and in ensuring your business run smoothly.
Reducing Costs and Improving Efficiency: Maintaining a healthy and efficient supply chain is key to reducing production costs, this can be brought about by automation in operations and management, however, it should not come at the cost of quality.
Maintaining Machine Efficiency: Preventive maintenance is essential to any product manufacturing process. It is vital that you perform frequent machine maintenance procedures in order to operate at full capacity and avoid breakdowns that lead to production delays, ultimately affecting the production throughput of the entire manufacturing business.
The Actual Cost of Product: The total cost of manufacturing a product can vary based on the contract agreement, shipping fees, market fluctuations, tax, and more. Therefore, identifying the actual cost of the product is an ongoing challenge for manufacturing businesses, it also necessitates a detailed examination of your firm’s departments and determining how they may have contributed to the production process and the related expenses.
Tracking Labor Logs: While automation and robotics become the norm to help lessen the labor gap in the industry, skilled workers will likely never become obsolete as they strive to analyze, solve, and manage challenges. Managing labor log manually however can present a challenge in maintaining an efficient production flow, leave management, and when planning for resource allocation. This can ultimately lead to inaccurate pay slips and appraisal management.
Client Relationship Management: Investing in technology to prioritize insightful client data and effectively managing sales leads is key to driving revenue and business growth. Keeping track of customer preferences, recurring data, demands, and trends can build the framework for customer retention in today’s competitive market.
Odoo MRP Features for the Manufacturing Industry
Odoo is an open-sourced, integrated platform that supports industries across various verticals, it is a robust, reliable, scalable, and economical ERP suite for managing all types of businesses. From marketing automation and website building to predictive analytics and business intelligence. Moreover, Odoo increases the operational efficiency of manufacturing businesses multifold, it can optimize and streamline operations such as the planning, scheduling, and processing of manufacturing orders. The following features will help you better manage a manufacturing company:
Bill of Materials: The bill of materials (BOM) is essential in the manufacturing business, it is the list of materials and quantities necessary for the production of a particular product, helping manufacturers in maintaining product quality. Odoo Manufacturing ERP is developed around separate modules specialized for the manufacturing industry, its business intelligence framework and automaton capabilities can further assist in managing product pricing based on raw material costs, essentially recording every detail from raw material to the end product delivery.
Quality Control: Odoo ERP provides enterprises with the flexibility to configure quality inspections to take place at certain stages before items move forward. Delivering a holistic view of processes associated with quality assurance, preventive maintenance, and maintenance schedule. Odoo can also monitor different versions of a product lifecycle management, and manage its routing accordingly.
Inventory Management: Mass production manufacturing facilities have large quantities of inventory coming in almost on a daily basis. Odoo Inventory can help you automate billing based on sales orders, delivery orders, contracts, or time and material, monitor the status of your bank account to track drafts, paid and unpaid invoices, and drive effective process management with data-based decision making with customizable, detailed reports and dashboards.
Automation: As manual processes become obsolete and as digitization is becoming more and more important to the efficiency of manufacturing processes, it’s vital that supply chin and manufacturing workflows are streamlined and optimized with automation. Processes such as purchasing, inventory updates, accounting, sales, quality checks, product lifecycle management, maintenance, and more can be integrated and automated to drive accuracy, increase productivity, optimize processes, drive efficiency, and reduce operational costs. Empowering teams with the operational efficiency of the supply chain enables an agile and proactive work environment that can easily evolve with the changing supply demands of a dynamic market.
MPS (Master Production Schedule): Odoo features predictive capabilities and analytical tools that perceive vast datasets, identify patterns, and forecast future trends so manufacturing firms can effectively plan their production using the Master Production Schedule tool. Ensuring that production, and resource management is always aligned with future demand.
Odoo Maintenance: Odoo Manufacturing supports the planning and scheduling of maintenance orders for repairs and other fixes. Odoo enables easy management and organization of maintenance orders whilst allocating dedicated maintenance teams based on availability. Moreover, you can automate preventive maintenance scheduling by computing statistics such as average time to machine failure or repair. Track the progress of maintenance requests and plan activities with the maintenance calendar. Even use interactive dashboards to monitor operations and reduce the risk of equipment failure.
Workforce Management: Odoo’s HRM module supports advanced recruitment functionalities by automating segregation based on the candidate’s attributes for the post. It also supports in managing all employee data, compensation records, computing payroll based on hours worked, tracking new leave and work allocation requests, appraisals, monitoring performance and tasks, and more.
Wrapping Up
Odoo Manufacturing ERP integrates, streamlines, and optimized all manufacturing and supply chain processes from start and end. Odoo essentially unites different departments involved in the production process, enabling automation in the flow of real-time information and ensuring efficiency in production management, streamlining business processes, and in saving time on costly data errors.