What do a door manufacturer, a snack company, a CNC specialist, and a 3D greeting card factory have in common?
They all have to manage raw materials, production orders, inventory, purchasing, sales, quality, accounting, and dozens of other processes.
And, at some point, they all realized managing these processes through spreadsheets and disconnected applications were time consuming, and prone to human error.
We reviewed many success stories of manufacturers who chose Odoo as their ERP. We wanted to figure out what were the main benefits these companies get from implementing this solution. And, unsurprisingly, the same benefits appear again and again: connected operations, real-time information, practical automation, flexibility, and the ability to grow without multiplying software.
Let’s take a closer look.
Homepage of odoo.com, shows all the apps that Odoo replaces
Everything Is Connected
The main advantage of Odoo is that Manufacturing is connected to Sales, Purchase, Inventory, Accounting, Quality, Maintenance, and the rest of the business.
The whole flow is integrated, and every team can work from the same place, with the same live data. For example, when a quotation becomes a sales order, the system can generate the required manufacturing and purchasing operations. When materials are received or consumed, inventory is updated. Once the product is delivered, accounting receives the information it needs.
All of these steps can be automated and heavily customized to your specific business needs. There is no need to copy the same data between several applications and spreadsheets anymore.
For VanAir, this means connecting everything from purchasing raw materials to invoicing the customer. The company estimates that Odoo reduced the time required for this overall process by approximately 50%.
This is particularly impressive because VanAir manages close to 2,500 SKUs and thousands of possible door configurations.
VanAir team using Odoo at the workshop
Kraus Motor Company has a similar challenge. It manufactures motorcycle parts entirely in-house, from raw materials to packaged products. By progressively connecting Accounting, Inventory, Manufacturing, Purchase, Project, and other applications, the company gained the structure it needed to more than double its personnel and continue scaling.
Live Data Available At All time
Manufacturers need to know what is happening now, not what happened when somebody last updated a spreadsheet.
Can Sales promise this delivery date? Are the required materials available? Which operation is delayed? What is the actual cost of the order? All these questions can be answered in a few click.
With disconnected tools, answering these questions often requires emails, phone calls, or a quick walk (or even a ride?) across the factory.
At KUCHT, sales representatives can now see stock levels, incoming products, and product availability directly in Odoo. The purchasing team can also use sales information to identify which appliances are moving fastest and adjust procurement accordingly.
KLC Taiwan also replaced paper documents, Excel files, and experience-based decisions with live inventory forecasts and production data. Managers can follow sales and manufacturing progress from their phones without calling the factory for updates.
The result? Its on-time delivery rate increased from 60% to 97%.
Joanna Wu - General Manager and second-generation successor of Taiwan KLC
For MachMotion, every CNC upgrade is tracked through engineering, purchasing, production, quality control, shipping, and field service. All departments can see the state of a project, while management uses live dashboards during weekly meetings.
Everybody works with the same information. That alone can prevent a surprising number of mistakes.
Automation That Solves Actual Factory Problems
“Automation” is one of those words software companies like to use everywhere. But in manufacturing, useful automation removes repetitive work and prevents avoidable errors. It's not adding automations and AI because it sounds cool.
“Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated."
- Elon Musk
This quote is an actual tweet of Elon Musk admitting his mistake. At the beginning of Tesla, the strategy was to automate whatever could be automated. They built their processes around automation, and phased out humans as much as possible. After a while they realized that their processes were not optimized, or just didn't work. They built entire production floors around workflows that didn't work, because automation was cool. Therefore they changed their strategy to, first build processes that work. Then automate the ones that have a real need for automation.
At Meridionale Impianti Singapore, they did not make the same mistake. Their workflows were well established. But, creating complex Bills of Materials and Purchase Orders used to involve slow, error-prone manual entry. This is where automation makes sense. With Odoo, the company can automate BoM creation, see material costs immediately, generate Purchase Orders, route approvals, and trigger Manufacturing Orders.
Technicians receive accurate information about the materials they need without the usual back-and-forth between the office and the production floor.
Engineering Plastic, a 40-year-old manufacturer operating 70 machines, uses automated quality alerts to react quickly when inspections fail. Inventory, manufacturing, quality, and accounting data are connected, helping the company avoid shortages, delays, and late detection of defects.
Engineering Plastic Director
At Lovepop, workers scan barcodes when starting and completing operations. Odoo records production time, monitors material waste against a 1% tolerance, calculates estimated production costs, and gives each worker a digital list of tasks.
The factory has completely removed paper-based tracking during shift handovers. According to the company, Odoo also helped it quadruple production output.
Easier to Implement Than Traditional ERP
Implementing an ERP is not an easy task.
Your data needs to be cleaned. Your processes need to be understood. Your employees need to be trained. Odoo does not magically remove this work.
However, the customer cases show that implementation does not have to be a massive, all-at-once project. And Odoo's flexibility allows for gradual implementation, starting from your most important workflows, and adding new ones through time.
Kraus Motor Company started with Accounting and Inventory before progressively adding Manufacturing and other applications. That helps keep the project size manageable, and limit disruption of employees habits.
Kraus Motor Company production floor
KLC’s general manager gives similar advice: do not try to create the perfect system in one big implementation. Start gradually, then expand as the company learns and its needs evolve.
This modular approach is one of Odoo’s greatest strengths. A manufacturer can start with Accounting, Sales, Purchase and Inventory, then add Manufacturing, Quality, Maintenance, PLM, CRM, and eCommerce when required.
The interface also remains consistent across these applications. Once users understand how to navigate Odoo, chatter, activities, filters, and document views work in familiar ways throughout the system.
Built to Grow with the Manufacturer
Odoo scales with your company. It works the same way with 1 or 100 users. Or with 10 orders a month or 1000. So as you company grows, simply add new users, increase memory or resources for your database, and that's it!
There's also a built-in features to manage multi-companies if you open new branches. Opening new workshops, or new plants can easily be covered with a little bit of configuration.
Top Seedz replaced QuickBooks, TradeGecko, spreadsheets, and other disconnected tools with Odoo. The platform now supports manufacturing, traceability, inventory, purchasing, sales, and internal collaboration as the company expands internationally and increases production capacity from 16,000 to 32,000 boxes per day.
VanAir grew production at its own facility from roughly 1,800 doors to nearly 7,000, with a target of 15,000. It is already considering Odoo’s multi-company features for a future U.S. facility.
Meanwhile, Rack USA uses Odoo to standardize processes and coordinate manufacturing, logistics, and industrial projects across the United States and Mexico.
Rack USA's team keeps growing
These are very different manufacturers. Yet the recurring benefit is the same: they can add volume, employees, locations, and processes without rebuilding their entire software environment.
Conclusion
Odoo is good for manufacturing because it solves a very common problem: too many operations running in too many separate places.
The result is less duplicate work, better traceability, faster decisions, and clearer instructions for everyone. It does all that with the potential to keep scaling and growing your business.
Odoo is also flexible enough to support small manufacturers without limiting companies operating large factories or international locations. You can begin with the processes causing the most problems and expand the system progressively.
And judging by what these manufacturers actually achieved (50% less processing time, 97% on-time delivery, paperless production, four times the output, and significantly more production capacity), that flexibility can produce very concrete results.
I genuinely hope that this article is helpful. And if you have any remark, suggestion or question, you can comment this blog post, email me at louis@cdb.solutions or send me a DM on LinkedIn.
Thank you,
Louis