Multi-production

The problem

Odoo's manufacturing runs one way: several components go in and one product comes out. The bill of materials describes it in advance and the system executes.

Some industries work in exactly the opposite direction. You buy a board, a sheet, a roll, and you cut it into several different pieces. No bill of materials describes that, because what comes out depends on how the cut was laid out that day. And the question that follows has no answer in the system: if the board cost twelve hundred pesos, what did each of the six pieces that came out of it cost?

The answer gets worked out on a separate spreadsheet, by hand, and an estimated cost is typed back in. Quotes, sales and the whole margin of the business rest on that badly computed number.

How it works

On a single screen you record both halves of the process: which inputs you used and which products you got. With no bill of materials beforehand — you enter what actually happened, which on a cutting floor is different every time.

Cost is split by surface area. Each piece contributes its square metres, taken from the measurements on its own product record so nobody mistypes them, and the module totals the usable area and prorates the input cost in that proportion. A piece taking twice the board costs twice as much.

Underneath, the cost isn't split by hand: a transitory production order concentrates the value of every input into a temporary product, and from there it is distributed to the resulting products. That detour is what makes the figures tie when several different inputs go into the same cut.

The module then generates one production order per product that came out, with its traceability: from the finished piece you can reach the board it came from, and from the board everything obtained from it.

Waste, computed rather than estimated

A cut always leaves offcuts, and those offcuts usually drop out of sight.

Here they come from a subtraction: the area that went in against the area that came out as pieces. The difference is the waste, recorded on every production so yields can be compared between cuts, between operators and between periods.

It is the number that tells you whether the problem is the supplier, the cutting layout, or whoever is doing it.

What saves time

Repeating cuts are saved as templates: pick one and the inputs and products fill themselves in, leaving only quantities to adjust.

And the semi-finished pieces that come out sit in stock with their average cost updated, ready to be used as an input to a finished product in a traditional bill of materials. The cut's real cost travels forward instead of getting lost.

Every production accepts attachments, so the cutting diagram lives next to the numbers.

What it does not do

It does not replace Odoo's standard manufacturing, and it does not coexist with it. It is a separate flow, reactive and manual: entered after the cut happened. If your process does fit a bill of materials, use native manufacturing.

It does not validate yields. There is no expected figure to compare against automatically: the module computes waste, but won't tell you it is too much.

It is a materials module. It costs neither labour nor machinery.

And one non-negotiable condition: every product involved has to be on average costing (AVCO). Without it the proration cannot split correctly, and that is the centre of everything else.

The transitory product creates a stock movement that is removed almost immediately — it exists only to carry the cost across, but it is worth knowing it is there.

What changes

Each piece's cost stops being a spreadsheet estimate and starts coming from the actual cut, with the area it genuinely took up.

And waste — which in this kind of process is where the margin goes — stops being a feeling and becomes a number you can compare month against month.