Hi All,

I wanted to post this here in order to gather some insight on whether this strategy is a possible solution to a specific problem that my has company and possibly help anyone else who is or has struggled with a similar scenario. This post may become quite lengthy, however I feel I need to share and hear some feedback so thank you in advance.

For some background, my company manufactures custom products for each customer with a wide variety of options which results in products with variants in the range of 1,000 to 10,000+ range.  The components of these products go through many routes including: dropshipping subcontractors, buy, MTO, resupply subcontractors, manufacture etc. I will try to briefly go over how our product flow works. 

Our products either arrive directly from vendors or are dropshipped to subcontractors and then sent to our warehouse. Once necessary products arrive they are manufactured in house and then sent out to a painter. After painting they return to our warehouse and are "manufactured" or assembled before being shipped. 

This creates a challenge in Odoo due to an ever increasing number of product variants in not only size/shape but color combinations as well. It is impractical to have a BOM structured as Assembled Part

At this point I have spent almost a month attempting to find a solution in the standard online version of Odoo and when figuring out how to dropship subcontractors I realized I could do something similar for my painting operations. Up until this point I had accepted that painting options would be a separate product rather than a variant of my standard products. With this being true I can set the painting Bom as subcontracted and use a non-specific by-product created in manufacturing at the same time the product would normally be ready to be sent for painting. This by-product allows me to create POs and resupply orders for sending the products to paint which otherwise we would have to do completely on paper outside of Odoo.

The main issues I see with this approach is not being able to easily associate the by-product directly with the component. It is not ideal but for this we are planning to associate the sales order number with the paint operation. This at least allows for Odoo to track the purchases from subcontractor and resupply and the rest will be handled by staff. 

If anyone has any insight on this workflow I would appreciate it. Also if anything is unclear please let me know so I may clarify. Hopefully this works and possibly helps someone with a similar issue out.