Hi!
I've been trying to implement Odoo in my company for a couple of years, and I always end up at a point where I give up, because I think it doesn't fit my bussines. However, I really want to make it work.
I currently manufacture a family of 24 products, each of which has between 7 and 14 different versions or variants. My clients' orders are usually quite large in terms of quantities, and they can easily demand quantities of more than 5,000 units.
The manufacturing of the products is not very special. Most of the examples in Odoo tutorials are very oriented towards the manufacturing of products of complex composition, such as a desk or a computer, where there are many parts to assemble, and the orders are for few products.
It doesn't help my team that Odoo generates 5,000 almost identical manufacturing orders. Therefore, I wonder if it is possible to use the sales module to generate invoices, charge customers, and generate orders, and on the other hand the inventory module so that the inputs involved in those sales are deducted from the stock. I need a list of the demanded products to arrive at my plant so that they can be packaged, and for the inputs involved in those products to be deducted from the stock.
Example:
Let's imagine a t-shirt factory. The BIM for a t-shirt would be composed of the front and back cutouts, 2 sleeve cutouts, a label, and a plastic bag.
In addition, each t-shirt comes in 4 sizes (S, M, L, and XL), and in 5 colors (white, black, red, green, and blue). Now, let's suppose that Walmart asks me to resell 20,000 t-shirts of each of these combinations.
In this type of product, it doesn't make much sense for the workshop to receive 500,000 manufacturing orders, all almost identical, explaining that a t-shirt has a front, a back, two sleeves, a label, and a bag. This is more appropriate for a furniture factory, perhaps.
A company of this type has machines that cut and sew thousands of t-shirts per hour. They only need to know how many to make, so they can then change the color of the fabric, the size of the molds and the label when reach that amount. And they need labels and bags to be deducted from stock, because they buy them from an external supplier, and they want to know when to order more.
There must be a misunderstanding here.
If you will produce 20000 t-shirt for each of the 20 variants (4 sizes x 5 colours), you get 20 manufacturing orders. One for each variant.
I see. So the way I load the products affects that. I should create variants of the products and not upload them as a new product.
However, it is more manageable, but still quite messy for the way my company works. I tend to have 10 to 20 orders being produced at the same time, and all of them have these characteristics. Going back to the t-shirt manufacturer example, if the company make 10 different sales like the mentioned in one week, it would get 200 manufacturing orders. In my case, it is completely useless. I just need to know how much to send to each client, and therefore set up the machines to produce that.
That is why I would like to know how should I set up inventory and sales module to avoid using manufacturing module, and if I still need to have the manufacturing module installed and configured despite not using it.