Case studies / Manufacturing
Case studyOne Odoo platform for a five-plant manufacturer
A discrete manufacturer with five plants in three countries replaced plant spreadsheets and a separate accounting package with one Odoo platform for planning, costing and consolidation.
Overview
A discrete manufacturer of engineered components with five plants across three European countries and a workforce of about 1,800. The business had grown through acquisition, and each plant had kept the habits and tools it arrived with.
Scale. Eight legal entities, tens of thousands of active items and thousands of bills of materials, with intercompany flows between plants and three operating currencies.
The challenge
Every plant planned production in its own spreadsheets. Planners were skilled, but each worked from a different picture of demand, stock and capacity, and nobody could see the group position without phoning round.
Accounting sat in a separate package that knew nothing about what the plants were making. Each month-end began with a manual consolidation across eight entities and three currencies, and intercompany balances rarely matched first time.
Product costing was a quarterly workbook maintained by one analyst. It mixed standard rates from years earlier with estimates for newer lines, and sales teams had stopped trusting it for pricing.
Supply problems surfaced late. A supplier delay was usually discovered when a line stopped for want of a part, by which point the only options were expediting at a premium or rescheduling customers.
The board wanted a single view of the business before approving further acquisitions. The first step was getting all five plants onto one way of planning, buying and costing, without halting production while the change happened.
The solution
Odoo Manufacturing now holds routings, work centres and subcontracting for all five plants. Production orders, component reservations and capacity loading sit in one system, so a planner in one country can see the effect of a schedule change on a sister plant that supplies the same assembly.
Inventory runs with lots, serials and multi-warehouse transfers, and intercompany movements create matching documents in both entities. Purchasing and MRP planning work from the same stock and demand picture, and quality control points stop non-conforming material before it reaches a line.
Multi-company accounting handles intercompany invoicing and consolidation across the eight entities. Product costing rolls up standard and actual cost from materials, labour and overhead, so variances appear in the month they occur rather than at the next quarterly review.
The engagement
- Fourteen months
- Nine specialists
- Global template design, Odoo configuration for manufacturing, inventory, purchasing, quality and multi-company accounting, five integrations, data migration and a three-wave rollout.
Integrations
- Shop-floor data capture terminals for production and labour bookings
- Supplier EDI for purchase orders and advance ship notices
- Bank statement and payment file exchange in each country
- Product structure exchange with the engineering system
- Group reporting in the BI platform
How we delivered it
- 01
Template design
Ten weeks
We mapped planning, purchasing and costing in every plant with the people who did the work. Out of those sessions came one global template, with local variants allowed only where law, tax or a genuinely different process required it.
- 02
Build and data model
Sixteen weeks
We configured the template in Odoo, built the five integrations and designed the item, bill of materials and routing data model. Real orders from each plant were loaded early so planners could test against work they recognised.
- 03
Cleansing and testing
Fourteen weeks
Master data went through three full mock loads, each one cleaner than the last. Integration and user acceptance tests then ran plant by plant, with each plant signing off its own scenarios.
- 04
Three-wave rollout
Twenty weeks
The plants went live in three waves, grouped by country and product family. A hypercare team was on site for the first weeks of each wave and fed fixes back before the next one began.
Results
- One live production plan shared by five plants
- Routine month-end close across eight entities and three currencies
- Monthly cost by product and plant used in pricing and sourcing
- Supplier delays visible before they stop a line
Planning moved from weekly spreadsheets to one shared live plan across all plants. Advance ship notices from key suppliers now arrive in the plan, so late deliveries show up as exceptions days before a line would have stopped.
Month-end consolidation became a routine process rather than a manual exercise. Intercompany balances match by design, and the finance team spends its close reviewing numbers instead of assembling them.
Cost by product and plant is now visible every month. Within the first two quarters it changed several pricing decisions and moved the sourcing of two component families between plants.
The template has also become the starting point for future acquisitions. A newly acquired plant can now be mapped against a known design rather than starting from a blank page, which shortens integration and gives the board the group view it asked for.
The day our planners found their own orders in the test system, the conversation changed from whether this would work to what else we could put in it.
What made the difference
Planners trusted the new plan only after they saw their own orders in it, so we migrated real data early.
