Manufacturing agent
The component about to stop a run, named and dated, while there is still time to order it.
In short#
The Manufacturing agent (Antoine) connects to your Odoo Manufacturing module, read-only. He reads your confirmed and in-progress manufacturing orders, their bills of materials, your physical stock and your expected purchase orders.
His maths is not a forecast. He explodes the bills of materials of confirmed orders, subtracts available stock and dated incoming supply, and reports what is actually missing, for which order and by which date. A need written into a confirmed order is a certainty; an average consumption is an estimate, and that is not his job.
What the agent detects#
- Dated component shortages: one alert per threatened component, with the missing quantity, the first manufacturing order it blocks and the date by which it had to be ordered given the supplier lead time
- Runs at risk: the same arithmetic seen from the top, order by order, with the cause of the slip rather than the list of components
- Bill-of-materials reliability: the share of your open orders that have a bill of materials, and how fresh those bills are. When coverage is too low, Antoine says so and stops: a dozen alerts computed on stale bills would be precisely wrong, which is worse than no alert at all
- Stock captured outside the plan: components where Odoo reserves more than your open orders justify, a sign of demand the analysed plan does not explain
- Work in progress and on-time completion: the real progress of launched runs, and the share of runs finished on the promised date over the last six months
A worked example
The starting hypotheses
- 3 confirmed manufacturing orders, 260 bicycles in total
- 2 wheels per bicycle in the bill of materials, 300 wheels in stock and no incoming supply
The arithmetic
260 × 2 − 300
Result of these hypotheses
220 wheels
missing, tied to the first order they block and dated by your supplier's lead time.
That amount is the product of the hypotheses above. It is not a result observed at a customer, and we publish no typical range by company size.
Your own figure is computed on your own Odoo: the free scan produces it in a few minutes.
What you can ask him#
Detailed capabilities
54 ready-to-use actions across 13 categories. Identical to the prompt library available in the application.
BOM reliability
Examples:
- Can I trust my bills of materials?, Reliability check that comes before any coverage analysis
- BOM coverage rate, The threshold below which Antoine refuses to conclude
- Orders without a BOM, The orders no shortage analysis can see
+ 1 more action in this category
Component coverage
Examples:
- Component coverage by order, Crosses confirmed orders with bills of materials
- Where does my overall coverage stand?, The raw counters before drilling into detail
- What passes and what does not, Gross requirement against stock plus expected purchase orders
+ 1 more action in this category
Shortages
Examples:
- Critical shortages, The ones where ordering today is no longer enough
- The heaviest shortage, The widest gap between requirement and availability
- Exactly how much is missing, The four figures a purchase decision rests on
+ 1 more action in this category
Series at risk
Examples:
- Production risks this week, Overview: series at risk and missing components
- Which runs may slip, Shortages grouped by run rather than by component
- Runs blocked by several components, The ones a single replenishment will not rescue
+ 1 more action in this category
When to order
Examples:
- My order-by dates, Date of need minus the observed supplier lead time
- What should I order today?, Today's purchase list, sorted by urgency
- What is already too late, Where the question is no longer avoiding the delay but managing it
+ 1 more action in this category
Horizons
Examples:
- The next 7 days, The window where only firefighting is left
- The next 30 days, The window where a normal replenishment still fits
- The coming quarter, The supplier negotiation window
+ 1 more action in this category
Stock held outside the plan
Examples:
- Reserved stock the plan does not explain, Demand invisible to this scan is holding physical stock
- What demand is holding my stock, Orders beyond the horizon, orders without a BOM, sales and transfers
- Displayed availability against real availability, Gross stock can be optimistic, this reading says so
+ 1 more action in this category
Trade-offs
Examples:
- Which run to save first, Trade-off between runs competing for the same component
- The component blocking the most runs, One replenishment that unblocks several orders
- What to tell the customer, Careful wording: a run at risk is not a run already late
+ 1 more action in this category
Blind spots
Examples:
- What this analysis cannot see, The counters that say how risky concluding would be
- Components with no date of need, Their shortage cannot be dated, so it is never alerted
- Empty bills of materials, An empty BOM passes the check and produces no requirement
+ 1 more action in this category
Reports
Examples:
- Deliveries & work in progress, Date keeping and orders in progress
- Orders at risk & components, Threatened series and missing components
- Production data quality, BOM reliability before any reading
+ 1 more action in this category
On-time delivery and work in progress
Examples:
- Do my series meet their dates?, How much credit to give the dates the shop floor announces
- My worst series delays, Past delays that should temper new promises
- Progress of series in production, Quantity produced versus time remaining
+ 1 more action in this category
Routines
Examples:
- Morning check, Three minutes of reading before the shop floor
- Weekly review, A quantified agenda for the production meeting
- Monthly BOM cleanup, Prioritises the cleanup by impact on coverage
+ 1 more action in this category
Multi-domain
Examples:
- Cash impact of late supplier, Crosses finance (cash) and purchasing (delays) in one query
- Stock out vs open quotes, Crosses inventory (availability) with sales (pipeline)
- Customer 360° view, Sales + finance + helpdesk for the same customer
+ 3 more actions in this category
The line with the Inventory agent#
This is the most frequent question, and the answer is methodological, not a matter of taste.
- Antoine (Manufacturing) answers when component demand is written: the component appears in the bill of materials of a confirmed manufacturing order. The result is verifiable line by line in Odoo.
- Sophie (Inventory) answers when demand is estimated: extrapolated from outgoing history, reorder points, coverage of an item with no order behind it.
Antoine does not cross that line. Asked about an item that appears in no confirmed order, he says so and points you to Sophie, rather than producing an answer that looks right without being right.
Required Odoo data#
Required modules
- Manufacturingmrp
- Inventorystock
Optional modules
- Purchasepurchase
The Manufacturing module is required, along with Inventory which it depends on. The Purchasing module is optional but useful: it carries the expected purchase orders and their dates, which is the difference between a gross shortage and a real one. Without the Manufacturing module, UpBoard simply shows no production alerts, and the domain reads as 'not monitored' in your health score rather than 100 out of 100.
Supported versions: Odoo 15 to 20 (Community and Enterprise).
What the agent does not do#
Stated explicitly, because it is what people often expect from a tool plugged into an MRP:
- No shop-floor load, no work centres, no bottlenecks. Routings are the least maintained layer of the domain; concluding on them would require a reliability nobody checks until something breaks
- No supplier or price choice. Antoine states a dated need, Marc (Purchasing) handles the buy
- No demand estimation. See the line with the Inventory agent above
- No writes to Odoo, see below
Human validation#
Agent
The agent detects
System
Alert
You
You decide
● No action is sent to your Odoo without your explicit approval.
Antoine works read-only. He never changes:
- Your manufacturing orders, their state or their dates
- Your bills of materials
- Your purchase orders
When an action is needed, he describes it so you can do it in Odoo, and stops there.
Frequently asked questions#
Which alerts does Antoine create automatically?
On every deep scan, Antoine creates one alert per threatened component on your confirmed manufacturing orders, with the missing quantity, the blocked run and the criticality date. Never an aggregated alert such as '3 components at risk'. His other analyses, work in progress, on-time completion, comparisons, are available as soon as you ask.
Why does he sometimes refuse to answer about my components?
Because his maths rests on your bills of materials. If too large a share of your open orders has no bill of materials, he tells you, quantifies the coverage and stops. A shortage computed on a missing or stale bill would be wrong without saying so, which is the worst of both cases.
Does he see sub-assemblies manufactured in house?
Yes, up to five levels. A component with its own bill of materials is not treated as a purchase: its need is first netted against its stock and the open manufacturing orders that produce it, and only the remainder is exploded into its own components. Kits, manufactured sub-assemblies and subcontracted parts each follow their own logic, as they do in Odoo.
What if several companies or warehouses share the same Odoo?
Stock is summed across every internal location your connection can read, all companies and warehouses together. So it is optimistic in a multi-company setup: a component may look covered while the stock sits in another company. Antoine reports what he could not count rather than counting it wrong.
Does my data leave my Odoo?
The agent reads your data through the Odoo API. Analyses run on our infrastructure hosted at Infomaniak in Switzerland. No data is used to train a model. Each customer has an isolated space. More details on our security page.
Read next
See this agent working on your Odoo data
A few minutes, read-only, no card. Then a trial on your real data: 14 days, or until the trial credit is used up.
Rather talk it through? Book a demo