How a German precision manufacturer hit 99.4% on-time delivery with Odoo shop floor MRP

The challenge

Running three plants and eighteen work centers building precision industrial equipment with up to five tiers of sub-assemblies meant that a single finished machine could depend on more than 450 discrete components. Work order progress, machine runtimes, and worker hours were recorded on paper job travelers, creating a reporting lag of 24 to 48 hours before plant management could see what was actually happening on the floor.

Engineering change orders frequently failed to propagate into active production, causing assembly reworks and the occasional consumption of now-obsolete parts. CNC machining, welding, surface coating, and assembly lines were scheduled without coordination, leading to work center idle time in one area while another became the bottleneck holding up dispatch. And raw material price swings, scrap rates, and labor variances were only calculated on monthly spreadsheets. By the time a margin problem on a production run was visible, the run was long finished.

Why Odoo and Why GritXi?

The client needed multi-level BOM management, live shop floor data capture, work center capacity planning, and actual costing working together in real time, a combination that typically requires stitching together a PLM tool, a separate MES, and a spreadsheet-based costing process.

They chose Odoo because its Manufacturing (MRP), Quality, and Inventory modules could be extended into a genuine shop floor execution platform, with BOM, routing, and costing living in the same system instead of three disconnected tools. They chose GritXi because GritXi had already built the specific pieces a high-mix precision manufacturer needs (including the 5-tier BOM explosion engine, the touch-tablet shop floor kiosks, and the real-time actual costing calculation) rather than proposing a generic MES bolt-on.

The approach

GritXi built a connected manufacturing platform spanning engineering, the shop floor, scheduling, and costing:

Multi-level BOMs and engineering change orders

Five-tier BOM explosion automatically nests raw materials, sub-assemblies, phantom BOMs, and routing operations with revision versioning. When engineering issues a change order, active BOMs update automatically and production planners are alerted without halting manufacturing orders already running.

Interactive shop floor tablet kiosks

Operators log in with a barcode badge, start and pause operation timers, view technical drawings on-screen, and register completed units with a single tap. Barcode scanning of raw material lots consumes inventory directly at the work center, giving full forward and backward lot traceability.

Master production scheduling and capacity planning

A drag-and-drop Gantt board matches work orders to work center capacity, preventive maintenance windows, and worker shifts. Dynamic min-max replenishment rules automatically generate purchase requests for raw materials based on lead times and active production demand.

In-line quality control and real-time costing

Tolerance measurements and visual pass/fail checks, with defect photo uploads, are required before a work order can move to the next routing step, with one-click non-conformance and scrap workflows for anything that fails. Actual raw material consumption, machine-timer labor cost, and allocated overhead are tracked per finished unit in real time, replacing the old month-end cost estimate entirely.

Implementation timeline

Total go-live timeline: 12 months from project start to full production across 3 plants and 18 work centers.

The results

A story from the shop floor

Engineering issued a change order on a bracket sub-assembly used across three different finished machines. In the past, this routine revision under the old paper-based system would take days to reach every affected work order, if it reached them consistently at all. In the past, this kind of gap had led to a batch of units being assembled with the outdated bracket, discovered only at final inspection and requiring a costly rework.

After go-live, the change order updated every active BOM referencing that bracket within minutes, and the shop floor kiosks immediately showed the revised part number and drawing to any operator starting a matching work order. Two work orders already in progress were flagged automatically for a supervisor review before continuing, catching the transition cleanly instead of discovering it at final inspection.

What the client said

Illustrative case study prepared for industry publication. Client identifiers are anonymized.

Technology used

• Odoo modules: Manufacturing (MRP), Quality, Maintenance, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Inventory & Barcode
• GritXi custom builds: 5-tier hierarchical BOM explosion with ECO automation, interactive shop floor tablet kiosks, master production scheduling & work center capacity planning, in-line quality control gates, real-time actual vs. standard costing engine