Odoo from scratch in food manufacturing: lots, shelf life, costing

The challenge

A snack producer had grown to three lines and 40 SKUs while still running without an ERP. Orders arrived through messengers, shipments were written in a notebook, shelf life was controlled visually. Their retail customer required lot traceability from raw material to pallet — a requirement they could not meet, putting the contract at risk.

Approach

We did not move the chaos into a system. First we described the target processes, then configured.

Weeks 1–2. Data model

• products: raw materials, semi-finished goods, finished goods, packaging;
• units of measure with dual tracking (kg and units/boxes);
• lot tracking with mandatory expiry dates for raw materials and finished goods;
• warehouses and zones: receiving, raw materials, production, quarantine, finished goods, dispatch.

Weeks 3–5. Manufacturing

We configured BOMs with percentage yield and loss rates, work centers per line, and operations with time tracking. Raw material requirements are calculated from the sales plan rather than guessed by the purchaser.

We also set up quality control: control points at raw material receipt and at line output, with lot blocking until the lab confirms the result.

Weeks 6–8. Warehouse and barcodes

Every pallet gets a GS1 label: SSCC, lot number, production date, expiry date. Warehouse staff work with handheld terminals; manual quantity entry is disabled for shipping operations — scanning only.

FEFO (first expired, first out) is configured at removal strategy level, so the system tells operators which lot to pick.

Weeks 9–10. Go-live and training

Two weeks of on-site support: issue triage, report tuning, role-based training (line operator, warehouse, purchasing, accounting).

Reporting

We built a management dashboard: planned vs actual output per line, yield, lot cost split into materials/energy/labour, and stock with an expiry horizon.

Results

• lot traceability in 15 seconds — from a pallet to a specific raw material delivery;
• shelf-life write-offs dropped almost threefold;
• production plan accuracy improved by 27%;
• the retail chain audit was passed on the first attempt.

Cost of ownership

Odoo Community on their own server in Docker, daily database and filestore backups, scheduled updates. Monthly cost is infrastructure and support only.