Manufacturing ERP That Connects the Whole Floor
Index World implements manufacturing ERP for discrete, process and engineer-to-order manufacturers. We configure bills of materials, work centers, routings, MRP and the Shop Floor kiosk, then connect production to inventory valuation and the month-end close. Most manufacturers go live on core production, inventory and finance in 8 to 12 weeks.
Most partners stop at the factory door. We do not. We build the BoMs, map operations onto work centers, put Shop Floor on tablets and barcode the bins, then reconcile the stock accounts all of that feeds. Floor and books, fixed together. That is why our clients close the month in days rather than weeks.
Built for How Manufacturers Actually Run
Six stages, one connected system, from the pallet arriving at goods-in to the margin landing on the P&L.
Materials & Procurement
The BOM for works order 1184 calls 400 brackets, so steel is reordered on real consumption and scanned to its bin before the first cut.
Planning & Work Orders
The signed sales order raises works order 1184 on its own, and MRP schedules each operation against real work centre capacity.
Work Centers & Shop Floor
The press brake operator opens works order 1184 on the kiosk at the machine and closes it there, so progress is live.
Warehouses & Inventory
Finished brackets are scanned to a bin the moment 1184 closes, and raw, WIP and finished stock are valued apart.
Pick, Pack & Ship
The customer order pulls those brackets by barcode, so the packing list, the truck and the invoice all carry the same lines.
Costing & Month-End
At close, 1184 shows what the job actually consumed in material, labour and overhead, so the variance is a number you can act on.
Why Manufacturers Call Us
Manufacturers call us when the floor and the office have stopped speaking to each other. A customer asks where their order is, and three people give three answers. Quarter-end stock adjustments swing the valuation so hard the financials stop making sense. As an official Odoo Partner, we have solved that problem in packaging, automotive parts, furniture, food production and industrial equipment, across discrete, process, make-to-order and engineer-to-order production models.
For a packaging manufacturer we rebuilt bills of materials out of spreadsheets into structured multi-level BoMs, split products into raw, semi-finished and finished categories with their own valuation accounts, and configured MRP so a confirmed sales order raises its own manufacturing order. Stock-interim and work-in-progress accounts that had never reconciled were driven to zero. For an automotive parts manufacturer we mapped operations onto work centers, built bin locations with barcode picking, and put the Shop Floor kiosk on tablets. The same pattern shows in our work with Skutchi Designs.
Why it matters
Anyone can install the software. Plants stay broken because the floor gets fixed and the books do not, or the books get fixed and nobody on the floor changes how they work. We do both, and then we stay. Our longest-running manufacturing engagement has logged over 260 pieces of work with us, years past go-live and into every month-end. A system that is accurate on day one and drifting by month six has solved nothing. That is why our Odoo implementation process does not end at go-live. The certified partnership we hold is with Odoo, and it carries the majority of our manufacturing builds, while the same production work runs on Sage, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics and ERPNext. If your production model belongs on one of those, you will hear it from us before a licence is signed.
Industry Challenges We Solve
Disconnected production processes
Disconnected processes lose orders, because every handoff is a place for work to disappear. Sales confirms a job, someone re-types it into a production sheet, and purchasing hears last. Jobs get missed, duplicated, or built to the wrong spec.
Inventory nobody believes
Inventory accuracy collapses when raw materials, work in progress and finished goods share a single number. Quarter-end adjustments then swing the valuation so hard that finance stops trusting the balance sheet, and the audit becomes something to dread.
Production delays and bottlenecks
Bottlenecks form when planning ignores real capacity. A line stops because a component was never ordered, or a work order queues behind a work center that was already committed. Idle capacity is the most expensive thing on any floor.
No visibility on the shop floor
Shop floor visibility fails when production is reported on paper. Supervisors walk the floor to find out what is running, and the office learns yesterday’s numbers tomorrow. Decisions get made on information that has already expired.
Warehouse coordination that breaks down
Warehouse coordination breaks down without bin-level locations. Stock sits somewhere in the building, pickers hunt the racks, deliveries fail validation at the dock, and what you bill stops matching what you shipped.
Planning by guesswork
Planning by guesswork puts cash at risk. Promise dates get made on instinct, committed revenue is unknown, and procurement is sized on hope instead of demand. Capacity is then bought, or lost, for the wrong reasons.
What an Odoo Implementation Includes
One System, Five Reasons to Care
What an Odoo manufacturing implementation changes depends entirely on where you sit. Pick the seat that is yours.
You stop chasing jobs: a confirmed sale raises its own manufacturing order, so nothing rides on someone remembering.
You stop walking the floor for a status: live work-order progress from the Shop Floor kiosk answers the question before you ask it.
Shortages warn you first: reordering rules pull components days before a work order would have stalled.
You can promise a date and keep it: capacity-aware MRP plans against what your work centers actually deliver.
Parts are found first time: bin locations and barcode picking end the hunt through the racks, as they did for this distributor’s warehouse.
Counts reconcile first time: count sheets feed adjustments straight through, with a trail an auditor can follow.
Deliveries stop failing at the dock: a structured pick, pack and ship flow with paperwork generated from the order itself.
Dead stock surfaces early: slow movers get flagged while there is still time to sell them.
You get your month back: reconciliation that used to eat weeks runs as a routine you finish in days, with ongoing bookkeeping support if you want it.
The stock number stops being an argument: raw materials, WIP and finished goods each carry their own valuation account and their own defensible figure.
Valuation stops swinging: automated valuation and reconciled stock-interim accounts keep quarter-end from distorting the financials.
Aged receivables on demand: no more building the report by hand on the last Friday of the month.
One live picture: production, orders, stock and cash on a single screen that updates as the work happens.
Revenue you can see coming: committed orders at 30, 60 and 90 days, a real basis for planning cash and capacity.
Margin while you can still act on it: costing that tells you a job is thin this week, not next quarter.
Numbers everyone agrees on: the floor, the warehouse and the ledger finally tell the same story.
Every department gets its workflow written down: production, store, purchasing, sales and accounting, documented rather than remembered.
Training built for the job, not the software: role-specific walkthroughs and recorded Odoo training your team can rewatch.
Knowledge that does not walk out the door: when someone leaves, the process stays behind.
We are still here at month six: ongoing reconciliation, adjustments and close support, long after go-live.
How It Works, Your Path to Go-Live
The same path we have walked with manufacturer after manufacturer, and not one of them stopped the line to do it.
- Discovery & process auditWe map how work actually moves: routings, work centers, warehouse layout, product categories, costing method and chart of accounts, including the workarounds nobody wrote down.
- Solution designWe blueprint the future state on staging first: BoM structure, operations and work centers, bin locations, valuation method, and the automation rules that remove the manual steps.
- Build & configureWe import products, BoMs, on-hand quantities, locations and opening balances. Messy BoM data is where manufacturing timelines slip, so we clean and standardise it before it goes anywhere near live. If you are moving off an older version, we scope both together.
- Train & go liveProduction, store, purchasing, sales and accounting each get a documented workflow, role-specific training videos and e-learning, so day one is a relief rather than a risk.
- Optimize & growWe stay on, sharpening costing, extending dashboards, and adding barcode, maintenance and quality as volume grows.
Keep the Machines You Already Run
We connect what the shop already depends on rather than replacing it. Integration work is inside the same fixed monthly fee, not a change request.
CAD and product data
SolidWorks, AutoCAD, PLM exports
Bills of material get retyped from drawings, so the BOM in production stops matching the revision.
The current BOM and routing attach to the works order, and a revision updates in one place.
Shop floor and barcode
Tablets, scanners, label printers
Operators record time and quantity on paper, then somebody keys yesterday into the system tomorrow.
Time, quantity and scrap are captured at the work centre as the job runs.
Accounting
QuickBooks, Xero
Job costs live in production while the ledger sees a monthly summary nobody can trace back.
Material, labour and overhead post to the job, so margin is known while it is still open.
Customer EDI and portals
EDI 850 and 856, supplier portals
Purchase orders arrive as PDFs and get typed in, and advance ship notices are built by hand.
Orders load straight into the schedule and shipping documents generate from the actual pack.
Shipping and carriers
UPS, FedEx, freight brokers
Labels are bought on a carrier portal and tracking is pasted back into orders later, if at all.
Labels print from the shipment, tracking reaches the customer, and freight cost lands on the job.
Quality and maintenance
Gauges, calibration records, CMMS
Inspection results and machine downtime sit in separate logs that planning never sees.
Checks are recorded against the operation, and downtime reaches the schedule before it costs a delivery.
Using something not listed here? If it has a way to connect, we can almost certainly join it to your system. Tell us what you run →
Do not see the tool you run? An open API means if it can talk, we can connect it.
Five Systems Today. One Shop Floor After.
This is the swap manufacturers actually make. Not another tool sitting beside the spreadsheet, but one system carrying a part from quote through works order to the shipped job.
What the shop runs today
- Quotes priced from last year cost sheet and a feel for the hours
- Works orders printed on Monday, out of date by Tuesday
- Stock counted twice, once in the system and once on the shelf
- Operators writing times on a card for somebody to type up later
- Job cost worked out after the job shipped, if anyone has time
What it becomes on one system
- Quotes built from the current BOM, routing and real machine rates
- A live schedule the floor can see, updated as jobs move
- One stock figure, committed to real works orders
- Time and quantity captured at the work centre as the work happens
- Job cost visible while the job is still open
Nobody switches overnight, and you should not either. We move one workflow at a time, prove it, then move the next. See how a platform switch runs.
Got questions? We’ve got answers.
How long does an Odoo manufacturing implementation take?
Most manufacturers go live on core production, inventory and finance in 8 to 12 weeks. A full manufacturing rollout, including complete BoM migration, historical stock valuation, barcode and maintenance, typically runs three to six months. The variable is rarely the software. It is how clean your BoM data is, and how quickly your team can make configuration decisions.
What does an Odoo manufacturing implementation cost?
Cost is driven by scope, not by licence. The number of users, how many modules you deploy, how much data needs cleaning, and how far you sit from standard Odoo all move the figure. Odoo licensing is separate and recurring. We scope every manufacturing project before we quote, because a fixed price built on guesswork helps nobody.
Can operators use tablets on the shop floor, or does everything go through the office?
Operators work at the machine. We configure the Odoo Shop Floor kiosk on tablets at each work center, so they start, pause and close work orders in real time, with barcode scanning for component consumption. Quality checks, scrap and maintenance requests are raised on the same screen, which is why the office finally sees production as it happens.
Do you handle discrete and process manufacturing, and do you stay after go-live?
Both, plus make-to-order, make-to-stock and engineer-to-order production models. And yes, we stay. Our longest-running manufacturing client has logged over 260 pieces of work with us, years past go-live, and we still handle their reconciliation and month-end today. You can see the same pattern across our client case studies.
What is an ERP system in manufacturing?
A manufacturing ERP system is one database running orders, inventory, production and accounts together, so a works order, the stock it consumes and the invoice that follows are the same record. Instead of a quoting spreadsheet, a separate stock sheet and an accounts package that disagree, the shop floor and the office read the same numbers.
What does ERP stand for in manufacturing?
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. In a manufacturing business it is the system that plans and records what a job consumes: materials, machine time, labour and cost, from the works order through to the finished part and the invoice.
What is the best ERP system for manufacturing?
There is no single best system, only the best fit for how you make things. Discrete manufacturers building to order need routings, work centres and material planning. Process manufacturers need formulations, batches and yield. Odoo covers both, which is why it is our most common answer here, but the honest test is whether the system matches your production model before anyone discusses licences. Sage, NetSuite and Dynamics are on the table when they fit better.
How does ERP help in manufacturing?
It removes the retyping between quoting, purchasing, the shop floor and accounts. Material is committed to a real works order rather than promised twice, operators record time and quantity where the work happens, and job cost is visible while the job is still open instead of at year end.
How does ERP work in manufacturing?
A works order is raised from a confirmed sales order or a forecast. The system reserves the components, schedules operations against work centres, collects time and quantity as operators complete each step, then posts the finished goods and the true cost back automatically.