We have thousands of products in Odoo and each have many variants with unique SKU (internal reference).

When I want to add a particular variant of a product to a quotation, sales order or Purchase order, I enter its SKU but Odoo shows the product that contains that variant instead of selecting that variant with that SKU. Then I have to click on the matched product and select the variant from a pop up (with no SKU shown for each variant available to select)

How can I get Odoo to the select the product variant that I am entering it's SKU ?

I am using Odoo 16.0

I tested this in Odoo 17 and there it correctly selects the variant.