The challenge
A tooling and precision engineering company managed product revisions through a combination of shared drives, email threads, and a manual ECO (Engineering Change Order) process. Design changes made by the engineering team were not reliably communicated to the production floor, resulting in manufactured parts using outdated drawings.
The consequences were costly: scrapped parts, rework, and in some cases, tooling delivered to customers that did not match the current approved revision.
Additionally, maintenance records for manufacturing machines were kept in a separate spreadsheet, making it difficult to correlate machine downtime with quality issues in parts produced on those machines.
What we built
Odoo PLM module
- Revision-controlled BOMs — each product has a revision history; production can only use the latest approved revision
- Engineering Change Order (ECO) workflow — changes to a BOM or routing go through a formal review and approval process in Odoo before they are applied to production
- Approval routing — ECOs require sign-off from Engineering Lead and Production Manager before the revised BOM becomes active
- Revision comparison — side-by-side view of current and proposed BOM changes, with the specific differences highlighted
MRP integration
- Approved ECO changes automatically update the manufacturing BOM — no manual handover from engineering to production
- Work orders for in-progress manufacturing orders flag a BOM revision change and prompt a review before continuing
- Document attachments per BOM revision: the correct drawing PDF is linked directly to the BOM that production uses
Maintenance module
- Preventive maintenance schedules configured for CNC machines and surface grinders — maintenance requests auto-generated based on operating hours logged through manufacturing work orders
- Corrective maintenance requests logged by operators from the shop floor when issues arise
- Maintenance history linked to each machine; downtime reports show which machines were offline and when
Results
- 30% reduction in engineering errors reaching production — the formal ECO process and revision-controlled BOMs eliminated the informal workarounds that previously allowed outdated drawings to be used
- Mean time to approve ECOs reduced from 4 days (email-based approvals) to 1.2 days (Odoo workflow with notifications)
- Maintenance visibility — the engineering team can now see machine downtime history when investigating quality issues; two recurring quality problems were traced to worn tooling on a specific machine within the first month
- Audit trail — every revision change, approval, and production use is logged, which satisfies the client’s ISO 9001 documentation requirements