Operations Portal

The problem

In a plant running on Odoo, the person on the line needs two things: to know what to produce and to report what they made. Handing them full Odoo for that does not work. It is far too much screen for capturing three figures, it costs a licence per person, and the shop floor usually has one shared tablet, not a computer per operator.

So the report gets written on paper and somebody keys it in later. Hours or days pass in between: inventory runs behind, scrap goes unrecorded, and nobody knows for certain where an order stands until they ask.

How it works

The operator signs in with a password of their own — not an Odoo account — and sees the list of open orders: draft, confirmed, in progress and to close. They filter by status, person responsible, operation type, product or deadline, or search by reference or origin.

Opening an order, they can do two things, depending on their permission level:

• Report progress. They enter the quantity obtained and their notes. The order stays open and nothing is consumed; the entry lands in the order's history with the name of whoever recorded it.
• Close the order. They record what was produced and validate. That is when Odoo consumes the materials.

Closing offers two consumption modes, and the difference is money:

1. Per the bill of materials. It consumes what the list says, even if less product came out. The difference stands as scrap, which is what actually happened on the floor.
2. Scaled to what was produced. Odoo adjusts the components in proportion to the quantity obtained.

Every plant has its own policy: one is set as the default and the operator can switch it order by order.

And when Odoo raises a warning on validation — because consumption doesn't match the plan, or because production was partial — the portal resolves it on its own, honouring the quantities already captured. The operator never faces an ERP dialog they wouldn't know how to answer.

The second section: bills of materials

It can be switched on or off per client. It is the lookup of what goes into each product: components with their quantity and unit, the manufacturing procedure, the variant's photo and each component's scrap percentage.

When a component is itself manufactured, the page opens its sub-list with quantities already scaled, up to four levels deep. And a product can carry several lists — its variants — and all of them are shown.

Try it now

→ Open the demonstration

Sign in with the password 123456. It runs on sample manufacturing data, connected to no Odoo at all: open an order, enter a quantity lower than planned and close it in both consumption modes to see the difference.

It doesn't install into Odoo

It lives outside and connects through Odoo's standard service, so it works alike on Odoo Online, on Odoo.sh and on-premise. There is no module to install: the access model is built with Studio, and so are the extra fields for the bills-of-materials section.

It detects at runtime what the quantity field is called in whichever version you run — it changed between 16 and 17 — so it works from Odoo 16 to 19 without maintaining two versions of the code.

It speaks the way the company speaks

The portal's vocabulary is configuration, not programming. Out of the box it says "Manufacturing orders", "Bills of materials" and "Components"; a bakery changes it to "Recipe book", "Recipe" and "Ingredients" without touching a line. The same goes for the name, the logo, the colours and the typefaces.

It also ships with a demonstration mode on fake data: useful for showing it in a meeting or training someone without touching live operations.

What it does not do

It does not create orders or bills of materials. It reads what Odoo already holds and only writes progress and closure. Planning stays with whoever plans.

It does not measure times, downtime or OEE. It doesn't touch work orders or work centres: reporting is at the level of the whole manufacturing order, not each operation.

It does not pick lots or locations on closing. It uses the move lines Odoo already built. If a component is supplied from several lots and the order is closed per the bill of materials, the split is worth reviewing in the ERP.

It is not Odoo's sign-in. The password lives in the access model, and that is precisely the point — it consumes no licence — but it means two things: whoever administers that model administers access to the portal, and each operator needs their own password for the history to say who did what.

It is not a module you install and forget. It runs on its own server, at an annual cost separate from this development. Millora recommends where to host it and leaves it running; if you would rather use your own infrastructure, it installs there too.

It depends on Odoo answering. There is no second database to maintain, and by the same token there is no offline mode: if the ERP is unavailable, the portal does not operate.

And it deliberately has no list price. What is quoted is the implementation — the branding, the vocabulary, the access model, the permission levels and the connection to your Odoo — and that depends on how each plant's manufacturing is set up today.

What changes

Reporting stops being paper. What the operator captures lands in Odoo there and then, under their name, and inventory moves when the order is closed rather than when somebody gets around to re-keying it.

And the shop floor stops needing Odoo licences in order to report production.