ASAS Packaging produces plastic containers, closures, and labels for FMCG, lubricant, and chemical clients across three distinct production lines: blow molding for bottles and jerry cans, injection molding for caps and closures, and label printing for branded packaging. Each line has completely different BOMs, cycle times, and quality requirements.
Before Odoo, BOM management was an Excel nightmare. A single finished product — say, a 5-liter lubricant bottle with cap and label — required three separate BOMs managed in three separate spreadsheets by three different production supervisors. When a client changed their label design or cap specification, finding and updating every affected BOM was manual detective work. Version control was non-existent; the factory occasionally produced bottles with outdated specifications.
Quality control was reactive. Defects were discovered at final inspection, after the entire batch was produced. A slight color variation in blow molding or a misaligned print on labels would only surface when the quality inspector checked the finished goods — by which time the raw materials were consumed and the machine time was wasted. Defect rates hovered around 8%, and most of it was preventable.
Machine maintenance was purely reactive. Equipment ran until it broke. The blow molding machines in particular had expensive unplanned downtime — a single mold failure could halt production for 2-3 days while waiting for replacement parts that nobody had pre-ordered because nobody tracked maintenance schedules.
Oakland deployed Odoo Manufacturing, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), Quality, and Maintenance in 10 weeks. The implementation was faster than ARMOR Lubricants because Oakland already had packaging-specific workflows templated from internal experience.
Multi-level BOMs were structured hierarchically. A finished product (labeled 5L bottle with cap) references sub-assemblies: the bottle BOM (blow molding: resin type, weight, color masterbatch, cycle time), the cap BOM (injection molding: resin, mold specification, tolerances), and the label BOM (printing: substrate, ink, die-cut spec). When a client updates their label artwork, only the label sub-BOM changes — the parent BOM and other sub-assemblies remain untouched. PLM tracks every revision with approval workflows.
Quality control checkpoints were inserted at three stages: incoming raw material inspection (resin certification, color matching), in-process checks (weight, dimensions, visual after first 50 units off a new run), and final inspection (client specification compliance, labeling accuracy). Odoo alerts the supervisor immediately when an in-process check fails — stopping the machine before an entire batch is wasted.
Preventive maintenance schedules were configured for every machine: blow molding machines serviced every 2,000 cycles, injection molds inspected every 5,000 shots, printers calibrated weekly. Odoo generates maintenance work orders automatically and tracks spare parts inventory so replacement components are always on hand.
BOM management time dropped by 60%. Creating a new product variant (different bottle size, same cap and label) went from 3 hours of spreadsheet work to 20 minutes of cloning and modifying the parent BOM. Version control eliminated the outdated-specification production runs entirely.
Defect rates dropped from 8% to 5.2% — a 35% reduction — primarily from catching issues at the in-process checkpoint instead of final inspection. The biggest improvement was in blow molding, where weight variations were caught after 50 units instead of after 5,000.
Unplanned machine downtime decreased by 40%. Preventive maintenance replaced reactive firefighting. The 2-3 day mold failure shutdowns stopped because mold wear was tracked and replacements were pre-ordered. Spare parts inventory was optimized — enough stock to prevent emergencies, not so much that capital was tied up in a parts warehouse.
Waste tracking became granular. Every production run now logs raw material input vs. finished output, with scrap categorized by cause (machine setup, material defect, operator error). This data drove process improvements that reduced overall material waste by 12% in the first year.
“The BOM versioning alone was worth the entire implementation. We had a client change their cap thread specification, and in the old system, that change would have taken a week to cascade through every affected product. In Odoo, we updated the cap sub-BOM once and every parent product inherited the change automatically. Zero production errors from outdated specs since we went live.”