Odoo's yearly improvements has always been one of the attractive feature of Odoo which ensures that the system eventually catches up with some of the bigger and more established ERPs in the market. Odoo's v15 push was majorly on the Inventory side of the business, while v16 looks to be focusing more on the manufacturing side with it's revamped MES system. This article will attempt to analyse some of the changes and improvement v16 brings to the table.
WHAT IS A MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEM?
According to Gartner, Manufacturing execution systems (MESs) manage, monitor and synchronize the execution of real-time, physical processes involved in transforming raw materials into intermediate and/or finished goods. These systems coordinate this execution of work orders with enterprise-level systems and production scheduling .
The manufacture of goods and items require multiple processes to work in sync to ensure that the goods are manufactured efficiently, correctly and according to schedule. The Odoo MES allows production and general managers to ensure that these processes are carried out.
Before we delve any deeper into the topic, let's identify some of the challenges when it comes to managing manufacturing through software.
MANUFACTURING CHALLENGES
Manufacturing can be quite complex to manage, schedule and essentially ensuring that your factory is working as smooth as possible. Let's analyse some of the goals and challenges to any manufacturer, regardless of size:
- Main Objective of a manufacturing plant is to manufacture goods at a low cost and consistent quality.
- Hard to keep track of material usage and manpower efficiency.
- Scheduling can be complex.
- No visibility for work centre utilisation and times.
- Workers have no way to log their times against work orders efficiently.
MES OBJECTIVES
Some of the major functions in a efficient manufacturing system include:
- Budget & Financial Planning
- Sales & Operations Planning
- Product Design & Development
- Master Scheduling
- Materials Requirement Planning (MRP)
- Production Activity Control
- Vendor Order Management
ODOO V16 MES
The Odoo MES attempts to solve some of the challenges mentioned in the previous section. Some of the features that Odoo gives its users are:
- Improved Scheduling: Now users can re-plan work orders at the click of a button. The scheduling screen also takes into account interdependencies regarding operational sequence.
- Allow multiple users to login and out of a WorkCentre in a quick and east manner. This allows the production manager to view how many man hours have gone into the production of any finished or semi finished goods being produced.
- Better Costing: Employee timesheet costs are automatically now added to the cost of the product. This helps managers in estimating estimated vs actual costs.
- Customer Portal: If a Sales Order is linked to a manufacturing order, then the customer will be notified of the manufacturing order status in the portal itself.
- MO/BOM Overview: View the entire overview of the BOM in one screen, including, all of it's sub-assemblies, operations, all costs, raw material availability, expected availability.
- Barcode Operations: Complete your picking operations fully using barcodes to avoid any mistake in the wrong part getting picked.
For a full list of changes please visit this link.
Interested in a closer look at Odoo MRP and MES? Please do not hesitate to contact us, and one of our consultants and will be in touch with your shortly to go over your business pain-points.