"We are a manufacturer" tells you almost nothing about what the ERP has to do. The three manufacturing types we work with most in Qatar need the same platform configured in three fundamentally different ways.
Food production: recipes, batches and shelf life
A food factory does not have a fixed bill of materials in the engineering sense. It has recipes with yields, and the yield varies with the raw material. Configure it as a rigid BOM and consumption variance will never reconcile.
What actually matters:
- Recipes with yield and scrap so planned versus actual consumption is meaningful rather than noise.
- Lot creation at production, with lots carried through to dispatch — forward and backward traceability has to be a screen, not an investigation.
- Expiry and shelf-life rules driving picking automatically, instead of a storekeeper checking dates by eye.
- Quality checks recorded against the batch, so an audit or a recall is answered from the system.
The test for a food ERP is simple: pick a delivery from six months ago and trace every raw material lot that went into it. If that takes more than a minute, the configuration is not finished.
Automotive spare parts: the catalogue is the project
Here production is often secondary. The hard problem is a catalogue with tens of thousands of items where the same physical part is known by an OEM number, an aftermarket number, a supplier code and a local name — and each of those has been entered as a separate product at some point.
The counter says "no stock", the customer leaves, and the part is sitting on a shelf under a different code.
De-duplicated catalogue with cross-references and vehicle compatibility, so any code the customer quotes resolves to the same item.
Then stock policy: fast movers and slow movers cannot share the same reorder rules. Splitting items by movement class and setting reorder points from actual demand — rather than from memory — is usually where the working-capital saving comes from.
uPVC windows and doors: every order is a one-off
Made-to-measure fabrication breaks the standard product model entirely. You are not selling a product with a price; you are selling an opening of specific dimensions, in a specific profile system, with a specific hardware set and glazing.
What the system has to do:
- Price by dimensions at quotation, so two estimators quoting the same job produce the same number.
- Generate cutting lists automatically from the order — frame, sash, beading, reinforcement and glass sizes derived from the opening, not re-drawn by hand.
- Select hardware by rule, driven by sash type, weight and handing, rather than by whoever is picking that day.
- Carry site survey measurements back into production, because the measured opening is rarely the quoted one.
Get this right and the same record follows each opening from quotation through fabrication to installation sign-off. Get it wrong and you have an expensive quotation tool with a spreadsheet bolted to the back.
The common thread
All three need the same foundations — accurate stock, real costing, and a production record that finance and the shop floor both trust. What differs is the master data model, and that is decided in the first two weeks of the project. It is very hard to change later.
Running a factory on spreadsheets?
We have configured Odoo for food production, spare parts operations and made-to-measure fabrication. Tell us which one you are.
See our manufacturing work