Odoo for Industry · Metal Fabrication
Odoo for Metal Fabrication, Quoting, Routings and Material Traceability
Odoo Metal Fabrication ERP, MRP, Work Centers, Scrap and Mill Certs
Book a free 30-min auditWhy Do Job Shops Struggle With Standard ERP?
Fabricators are asked to quote jobs that have never been built before, using material whose price shifted last week, running through work centers that are already booked solid. Most ERP is built around a repeatable bill of materials and a stable cost, and a job shop has neither.
How Do You Quote Custom Work Without Guessing?
Experience and a spreadsheet are usually what quoting runs on, so margin ends up depending on whoever happened to price the job. Steel moves, but old quotes stay live regardless, and jobs get won at yesterday's material cost.
The quote is built by Odoo directly from the routing and the bill of materials, so labour by work center and material at current cost get priced off the same data that will later run the actual job. As soon as material cost shifts, you can see exactly which open quotes have gone underwater, rather than finding out at invoicing.
How Do You Know Whether the Shop Can Actually Take the Order?
A shop ends up expediting everything the moment it starts promising dates without knowing press brake and laser load. Because capacity mostly lives in a scheduler's head, whether an order actually fits depends on whoever you happen to ask.
Each work center gets modeled in Odoo MRP with its own capacity, and the routing spells out exactly which operations a part needs. Planned orders then load those work centers directly, so the delivery date reflects real committed hours instead of optimism.
How Do You Prove Material Traceability When a Customer Asks?
Aerospace, pressure vessel, and structural customers will ask which heat number went into a part, sometimes years after the fact. When mill certs are filed in a cabinet keyed by purchase order, that question can eat a full day to answer, and sometimes it just can't be answered at all.
Material gets tracked by lot or serial in Odoo, starting at receipt and continuing through every manufacturing order. The traceability report then walks backward from finished part to the heat it came from, with the mill certificate attached right to the lot instead of filed off somewhere else.
What Do We Deliver for Fabricators?
- Make-to-order quoting built on routings and live material cost
- Capacity planning across laser, brake, weld, and finishing work centers
- Lot and heat-number traceability, with mill certificates attached to the lot
- Scrap, offcut, and remnant tracking, so drop gets recovered instead of lost
Ready to Quote From Real Costs and Real Capacity?
Send over the last quote you lost purely on price. We'll dig into how you quote today, how work center load actually gets decided, and what happens the moment a customer asks for material certs.
Book a free 30-min auditFrequently Asked Questions
01
Can Odoo handle make-to-order with no repeat parts?
Yes, it does. Manufacturing orders can be created directly from a sales order in Odoo, and bills of materials can be built per job instead of maintained as standing products. Shops doing genuinely one-off work tend to template the routing rather than the BOM, since the operations repeat even when the part itself never does.
02
How does Odoo track offcuts and remnants?
Remnants typically get modelled as their own product with lot tracking, produced as a by-product of the cutting operation itself. Usable drop ends up back in stock that way, ready for the next job to consume it, instead of getting written off as scrap while you buy new sheet.
03
Does Odoo support nesting or CAD/CAM integration?
Nesting itself isn't something Odoo does. That stays in your CAM software, and the integration simply passes the resulting material requirement and cut time back into the manufacturing order. We scope that link explicitly, since the routing is only as valuable as the cut times feeding it are real.
04
How long does a fabrication implementation take?
A single-site fabricator typically goes live in 12 to 16 weeks. Quoting and inventory get tackled first, followed by routings and the shop floor. Traceability is usually staged last, unless a customer audit is already on the calendar, in which case we lead with that instead.