Mastering Odoo Inventory Management: Key Advantages & Functionalities.

Inventory management plays a crucial role in the trading of goods within businesses today. Various firms, such as eCommerce companies, distributors, and retailers, rely on efficient inventory management solutions to effectively oversee their retail locations, product storage, and warehouses. As a significant portion of a company's assets is tied up in inventory, not employing an inventory management system can lead to numerous challenges, including stock-outs, difficulties in product traceability, and subpar customer service. To address these issues and warehouse automation processes, many enterprises opt for the Odoo inventory solution, which stands out for its user-friendly installation process and effortless utilization.

For a small manufacturing operation, with limited inventory items, a small storage area, and a few customer orders, a spreadsheet might suffice for stock management. However, for larger and more complex environments, a more sophisticated inventory management system is required to efficiently collect, manage, process and report on all the data in as close to real-time as possible. Failing to accurately track every incoming and outgoing inventory shipment item can severely impact turnover and overall stock management. Therefore, a powerful inventory management system is essential for any growing manufacturing company to effectively manage their stock and ensure smooth operations.

This blog aims to enlighten you about the advantages of choosing Odoo for inventory management and the significance of utilizing its inventory management tools.

Advantages of Using Odoo Inventory Management

• Boosts Productivity

  • By offering immediate information access, efficient order editing, data accuracy assurance, and improved documentation flow. Odoo Inventory Management serves as a game-changing solution that amplifies productivity. Procurement employees can swiftly retrieve vital data, efficient order modifications, uphold precise records, and automate the entire warehouse processes. This optimized workflow eradicates delays, enhances decision-making, and empowers businesses to achieve unparalleled levels of productivity.
    
    

• Better Reports and analytics

  • Odoo Inventory ensures the timely and accurate update of inventory changes, providing businesses with regular and real-time information for generating reports. With Odoo's customizable dashboard, you can create and share reports in the desired formats, saving your valuable time. Moreover, level of access to these records can be controlled, allowing only approved individuals to view company details.

    
    The inventory management module in Odoo serves as an ultimate tool for enhancing analytics. Through comprehensive reports, you can analyze the inventory situation clearly, recognize any issues, and determine their causes and develop appropriate solutions. This enables you to address inventory-related challenges, forecasting  inventory product availability, and formulate a well-informed plan for the upcoming period.
    
    

• Ease of Integration

  • Odoo Inventory has the capability to integrate with other applications in two ways. The first is to integrate with other Odoo apps, secondly it also allows integration with third-party apps.

    Odoo Inventory offers automatic integration with various Odoo apps such as Sales, Purchase, Website, and Accounting to enhance its functionality. For instance, when creating a sales order, the Odoo Sales app is utilized, while the Inventory app enables the creation of products and verifies their availability of products in stock. Additionally, the Accounting app records the transaction and generates a journal entry for the sales.

    Moreover, Odoo Inventory supports integration with several third-party apps. As an example, let's consider a scenario where you operate a distribution business and already use a different accounting and payroll system instead of Odoo Accounting. In such cases, an odoo partner can assist you in integrating that solution with your Odoo system.
    
    

• Quality Management

  • The adoption of Odoo ERP facilitates the advancement of warehouse management processes, ensuring the maintenance of exceptional quality standards. By leveraging Odoo inventory, businesses can effectively deliver high-quality products to end-customers, resulting in excellent customer satisfaction. Moreover, Odoo ERP for warehouse management enables organizations to achieve strengthened productivity levels and maximize return on investment (ROI) by minimizing resource wastage.
    
    

• Easy Customizable

  • With its custom-tailored solutions, Customized Odoo Inventory Management optimizes inventory processes, enhances visibility, automates tasks, and seamlessly integrates with other modules. Personalized workflows and automation enable businesses to boost efficiency and minimize errors ultimately helps to gain competitive advantage in the market. Moreover, Odoo also provides a user-friendly interface for creating custom reports and dashboards. Users can design their own inventory reports, sales analysis, or stock forecasts using drag-and-drop functionalities. Additionally, businesses also have the option to develop customized software applications from the scratch, incorporating specific features and functionalities to meet their unique demands.
    
    

Key Features of Odoo Inventory Management System

• Barcode Integrations

  • Once users enable the barcode integration in the inventory settings, they gain the access to scan products using a connected barcode scanner device. The Odoo inventory barcode integration offers flexibility in two ways. Firstly, users can create different barcodes for their various products using the available nomenclatures on the platform. Secondly, Odoo allows users to print simple images of generated barcodes on product packaging.

 

• Multiple Warehouse Management

  • Do not worry if a company has multiple warehouses located in various parts across the globe. In that Case, Odoo Inventory offers to manage the inventory of all the warehouses under one platform.

    With Odoo Inventory, you can smoothly track and manage the movement and transformation of each product throughout the entire process, starting from the delivery by vendors to final delivery to the customers' doorsteps.

• Create Locations

  • Warehouse Locations in Odoo Inventory are specific places within a warehouse such as a floor or a shelf. Locations cannot be connected to multiple warehouses, but we can create multiple locations attached to each warehouse.

• Stock Removal Strategy

  • In inventory operations, removal strategies are used to pick the products on certain criteria like select the best products, optimize the distance for the worker, for quality control purposes, or to first move stock products with the closest expiration date. There are four types of stock removal techniques: FIFO, LIFO, Closest Location, Least Packages and FEFO in Odoo Inventory. These removal strategies help to manage product stocks efficiently.
    
    
• FIFO (First In First Out) – product stocked first will be moved first
• LIFO (Last In First Out) –  the products which are most recently bought that will be moved out first.
• Closest Location – products will be delivered from the closest location first.
• FEFO (First Expiry First Out) – products which are close to expiry will be moved first.
• Least Packages: Least Packages is a force removal strategy that avoids reserving quantities in two packs when the demand is available in one larger pack.
   

• Putaway Rules

  • In odoo inventory, use of the Putaway Rules is to avoid storing products at the wrong spot. This process helps put products in the most suitable stock management location once they are received from shipments.

    Let's say you manage a retail store that sells markers for whiteboards and personalized office desks. Within your warehouse, you want to ensure that the markers are stored in the designated marker pen area, while the desks are stored in the appropriate desk section. To achieve this organizational setup, you rely on Putaway Rules, which are utilized to arrange the products prior to their arrival at the warehouse. Putaway Rules can apply only when you have multiple locations.

• Reordering Rules

  • Odoo's inventory management allows users to establish reordering rules for the available products, ensuring that the company never runs out of stock or faces issues of overstocking. Warning messages are utilized in the Odoo platform to provide timely information about low stock levels. If a user decides to discontinue a product, they can easily remove the stocking rules from the product menu. Furthermore, automatic procurement can be configured within Odoo's inventory management system based on minimum stocking rules. The reordering rules in Odoo Warehouse enable users to define both a minimum and maximum stock count for products affiliated with these rules.

• Routes

  • The Odoo Inventory Management software allows users to configure & create routes of operation for the movement of the product for sales order, purchase orders, and manufacturing operation purposes. These routes are customizable and tailored to the specific business strategies employed by the company.

    The predefined routes in the platform play a crucial role in determining how products flow within the organization. Default rules are provided in the platform to define these operation routes, and they can be further configured to align with the company's operations. Push and pull rules are assigned to different routes to facilitate the necessary actions.

• Traceability

  • Within Odoo Inventory, users have the capability to track the movement of products both within the company and during shipping to customers. This traceability is made possible through the utilization of different serial numbers and lot numbers for multiple products. When receiving purchase orders from vendors at the warehouse, these serial and lot numbers are allocated specifically to each product. Odoo Inventory consistently ensures that a single product is assigned only a single lot number and serial number, while alerting users with warning messages if attempting to assign multiple products with the same serial number.

• Landed Costs

  • In Odoo Inventory, the landed costs enables users to include additional costs into the overall cost of a product. These additional costs involve transportation, customs duties, handling fees, service charges, shipments, and various others. It's important to note that landed costs can only be assigned to products that use the FIFO or AVCO costing methods. Automating the valuation of such products in the inventory is necessary.

• Shipping Method

  • Shipping methods empower you to designate the delivery of products based on different types of shipping services. Efficient and appropriate product delivery is an essential part of any business organization, as it brings numerous benefits. Shipping methods in Odoo provide the ability to manage the selection of transport companies, ship products using zip codes, pricing, and destinations for shipping. Odoo allows it to integrate with external shipping providers, enabling the system to calculate precise shipping costs and discover proper packaging for shipments.

• Scrap Management

  • Scrap Management in Odoo inventory is considered as a useless, damaged product or materials that can be recycled. The products can be expired as dates also included in scraps location.Managing scrap products is of utmost importance due to their financial value, which sets them apart from mere waste. Scrap Management in Odoo Inventory offers a smarter approach that not only helps you reduce costs but also ensures the ideal condition of products stored in inventory shelf locations.

Conclusion

What does Odoo Inventory mean to your business? For us, it is the mechanism our clients use to simplify stock management. The architecture of Odoo accelerates seamless integration with various modules such as CRM, purchase, sales, accounting, manufacturing, and many more. So, you can simply coordinate all inventory-related processes including delivery operation management, batch transfer, landing cost management, replenishment, scrap management, product and product variants management, warehouse analysis, and many more. A Well-maintained Inventory Management is the utmost important aspect of Supply Chain Management. The more accurate your inventory is, the easier it becomes to troubleshoot the issues.

These are some of the key elements to think about before switching to the Odoo ERP Platform. So, if you want assistance, SerpentCS is always ready to help you through the Odoo implementation, development, integration or migration process to ensure a seamless and trouble-free operation.

For further information, Please contact - contact@serpentcs.com.