Odoo Manufacturing is the MRP and shop-floor module inside Odoo, the open-source ERP used by more than twelve million people globally. For Australian manufacturers, it replaces the mix of Excel BOMs, JIM2 or Reckon, a whiteboard schedule and a separate job-card clipboard with a single system that handles bills of material, work orders, scheduling, quality, PLM and real job costing. It connects directly to Odoo’s Australian localisation — GST, BAS, Peppol e-invoicing and ABA bank files — so production and finance share one ledger.

We’re a Perth consultancy and we implement Odoo for Australian manufacturers across food, fabrication, cosmetics and industrial components. This article walks through what the module actually does, where it’s strong, where it needs configuration, what it costs, and how to scope a sensible rollout.

What Odoo Manufacturing includes

The manufacturing stack is a group of connected apps that install together. The core pieces:

  • Manufacturing (MRP) — bills of material, routings, work orders, work centres, scheduling, kanban boards for the shop floor.
  • Inventory — multi-warehouse stock, lots and serials, landed cost, putaway and removal strategies, cycle counts.
  • Purchase — request for quotations, supplier price lists, reordering rules that feed MRP.
  • Quality — quality control points on receipts, work orders and dispatches, with pass/fail and measurement recording.
  • PLM — engineering change orders, BOM versioning, revision control.
  • Maintenance — preventive and corrective maintenance on work centres, tied into scheduling so a down machine re-plans automatically.

Every record connects to the financial ledger. When a work order closes, Odoo posts the real material consumption, labour hours and overhead to a WIP account, then releases cost of goods sold on dispatch. That is the single biggest difference between Odoo and running production on spreadsheets — your P&L reflects what actually happened on the floor, not an estimate.

Replacing production spreadsheets: a Perth example

A Perth precision-fabrication shop we worked with had been running twenty-eight active jobs across three welders and a CNC cell using a laminated whiteboard and a shared Excel file. The owner’s wife rebuilt the schedule every Monday morning. Quoting margin lived in one workbook; the cutting list lived in another; MYOB held the invoices. Nothing reconciled.

We moved them to Odoo Manufacturing in eleven weeks. BOMs came in from the quoting spreadsheet; routings were built with the lead welder over two afternoons; tablets went into the bay with barcoded work-order cards. Within six weeks of go-live the owner could see real gross margin per job by Friday afternoon instead of guessing at month-end. The whiteboard is still there — it’s a noticeboard now.

That story is the pattern. Australian manufacturers rarely need exotic MES features; they need a clean BOM, a believable schedule, a way for operators to record what they did, and accounting that catches up without manual re-keying.

Scheduling, shop-floor tablets and work instructions

Odoo’s work-order scheduling runs off the routing on each BOM. Each operation points to a work centre, has a standard time, and consumes components at a step in the process. When a manufacturing order is confirmed, Odoo breaks it into work orders and slots them against the work-centre calendars.

Finite versus infinite scheduling

Out of the box Odoo schedules forward and honours work-centre capacity, but it won’t level-load across multiple resources the way a dedicated APS tool does. For most small and mid-sized Australian shops that’s fine — the bottleneck is one or two constraints and a planner who knows the floor. If you’re running twelve CNC machines in parallel with heavy tool-change dependencies, plan to pair Odoo with a finite scheduler or accept that the planner still does the last-mile shuffle.

Tablets on the floor

Operators log in to a kiosk interface on a tablet or cheap Android device, pick their work order, and work through steps one at a time. Each step can display a PDF drawing, a photo, a checklist or a quality check. Clock-on and clock-off are one-tap. Scrap, consumption and serial capture happen at the operation that caused them.

Clock-on, pause, complete

Labour time is recorded per operator per operation, so the work order ends with actual hours against standard. That’s what drives real labour cost and the variance report the accountant wants on the first of the month.

Quality, PLM and batch traceability

Quality control points

Quality points attach to a step in the routing, a receipt from a supplier, or a dispatch to a customer. A point can be a pass/fail, a measurement with tolerance, or an instruction with a photo. Failures can stop the work order and raise an alert. We use this pattern heavily for food manufacturers in WA who need CCP recording for FSANZ audits.

Engineering change through PLM

Odoo PLM lets an engineer propose a BOM change as an ECO, attach the drawing, route it for approval, and push it to production with an effective date. Older work orders stay on the old revision; new ones pick up the new one. For a fast-growing product business this is the difference between “we think the floor is building the latest revision” and knowing they are.

Batch and serial for regulated sectors

Lots and serial numbers are first-class. You can drive Odoo so every raw material consumed on a job is captured by lot at the moment the operator scans it. A recall search then traces downstream to every customer dispatch and upstream to every supplier receipt in under a minute. That’s the record most cosmetics and therapeutic-goods manufacturers need for TGA compliance, and most food manufacturers for FSANZ.

Peppol e-invoicing for manufacturer billing

Australian manufacturers selling into government, large private buyers or the big-four supermarkets are increasingly asked for Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 invoices rather than PDFs. Odoo ships native Peppol through an Australian Access Point and registers your ABN against the ATO’s Peppol directory. Once enabled, customer invoices flow out as structured e-invoices and supplier bills can be received the same way — no OCR, no re-keying.

The practical win for a manufacturer is payment time. Corporate AP teams that previously took 45 days to process a PDF invoice clear a Peppol one inside 10. A wholesaler we implemented for went from average days-sales-outstanding of 52 to 31 inside a quarter, worth roughly $180,000 AUD in released working capital on their AR book.

We cover registration, the AU Access Points, and the common configuration gotchas in our guide to Peppol e-invoicing for Australian businesses. For a manufacturer with a long AR list of corporate buyers, the payment-time uplift is usually the business case on its own.

Purchasing in AUD, USD and landed-cost accounting

Raw-material procurement is where the finance team earns its keep. Odoo’s Purchase module handles supplier price lists by currency, so a Chinese extrusion supplier quoted in USD and an Australian distributor quoted in AUD sit side by side on the same product record. Incoterms, lead times and minimum order quantities drive the reorder rules that MRP uses.

Landed cost is the bit most competing mid-market tools get wrong. When a container arrives, Odoo lets you allocate freight, customs, duty and clearance across the receipt by weight, volume or value, and those allocations post to inventory so the next job costs at the real landed figure rather than the FOB price. For an importer-manufacturer bringing in five containers a year at $80,000 AUD of freight and duty, getting that allocation right is the difference between phantom margin and real gross margin.

Bank-side, Odoo generates ABA files for batch supplier payments against ANZ, NAB, CBA and Westpac, and pulls bank feeds in automatically — the same setup we use with Xero and MYOB customers who’ve already trained their bookkeepers on the rhythm of daily reconciliation.

Payroll awards and shop-floor labour costing

Odoo’s native payroll does not interpret Fair Work awards, and we don’t recommend running Australian payroll on it. Every manufacturer we implement for runs payroll in Employment Hero, KeyPay or MYOB Advanced and integrates it with Odoo. The pattern that works: operators clock on through Odoo tablets at the work centre, timesheets flow to the payroll system for award interpretation, payroll posts labour costs back to Odoo against the specific manufacturing order. You get Fair Work-compliant payslips and a real labour number on each job. STP Phase 2 lodgement stays in the payroll tool, which is where it belongs.

The critical award-interpretation bits — Manufacturing and Associated Industries Award penalties, overtime thresholds, shift loadings, public-holiday rates — live in Employment Hero’s rules engine. Odoo just contributes the “who worked on what, and for how long” data, which is exactly what the award engine needs to produce a compliant pay run. The same pattern covers Horticulture, Food, Beverage and Tobacco Manufacturing, and the General Retail Industry Award for manufacturers with a shopfront side of the business.

Odoo Manufacturing pricing for Australian businesses

Odoo Online Standard sits at roughly $34 AUD per user per month for unlimited apps, so a ten-user shop pays about $4,100 AUD a year in licence fees. The Custom plan — required if you want Odoo.sh hosting, custom modules or multi-company — is around $68 AUD per user per month. On-premise via Odoo Community is free but loses the apps you usually want for manufacturing: Quality, PLM, Shop Floor, MRP II.

Implementation is the larger number. For a typical Australian manufacturer with five to twenty-five users, one warehouse and a Xero or MYOB data migration, budget $45,000 to $110,000 AUD delivered over eight to sixteen weeks. That covers process mapping, configuration, BOM and routing build, integrations, data migration, user acceptance testing and go-live support. Our realistic implementation timeline breaks the phasing down week by week. Add $15,000 to $40,000 AUD if you need finite scheduling, a custom EDI integration, or a custom shop-floor interface.

Implementation approach and timeline

We run manufacturing implementations in four phases: discovery, configuration, migration, go-live. The shop-floor-specific work that tends to catch people out sits in the middle two phases — BOM cleansing is almost always the slowest task, and routings take longer than clients expect because they require a conversation with the people who actually do the work. Businesses moving from MYOB or Reckon also need a clean accounting cutover, which we cover in our migrating from MYOB to Odoo playbook. The method we use on every project is on our implementation method page.

If you’re a manufacturer evaluating Odoo and want an honest read on whether it fits — and what a sensible scope and budget look like for your specific operation — talk to us. We’ll ask about your product mix, your team, your current systems and your timing, and we’ll tell you where Odoo is a good fit and where it isn’t. No sales script, no 40-slide deck.

Frequently asked.

Is Odoo good for Australian manufacturers?

Yes. Odoo Manufacturing covers BOMs, work orders, MRP scheduling, quality and PLM, and pairs with the Australian localisation for GST, BAS and Peppol. It fits small-batch and mid-volume discrete manufacturers well, and with configuration it handles food, cosmetics and regulated sectors that need batch and serial traceability.

How much does Odoo Manufacturing cost in Australia?

Odoo Online is around $34 AUD per user per month for all apps (the Standard plan). A typical five-to-fifteen-user Australian shop lands between $200 and $600 AUD per month in licence fees. Implementation is separate — expect $35,000 to $120,000 AUD for a properly scoped manufacturing rollout, depending on integrations and data migration.

What does Odoo MRP actually do on the shop floor?

It turns sales orders or stock forecasts into work orders, schedules them against work centres and people, and pushes step-by-step instructions to tablets at each station. Operators clock on, record quantities and scrap, scan components, and trigger quality checks. The result is real labour and material cost per job, not an estimate.

Does Odoo handle batch and serial traceability for Australian food and cosmetics?

Yes. Lots and serial numbers flow from goods-in through manufacturing to dispatch, so a recall traces downstream customers and upstream suppliers in minutes. It satisfies FSANZ record-keeping expectations for most food manufacturers and supports TGA traceability needs for therapeutic goods with modest configuration.

Can Odoo Manufacturing integrate with Australian payroll and award rates?

Odoo's native payroll is not configured for Fair Work awards. Most Australian manufacturers we implement for run payroll in Employment Hero or KeyPay and integrate it with Odoo for labour cost postings and timesheets. Shop-floor clock-on data from Odoo flows into the payroll system for award interpretation, and costs post back to the work order.