Ensure Product Traceability Odoo Style Like a Pro

Join us for this week's episode of Planet Odoo as we dive into the intricate world of product traceability with Odoo experts Clotilde and Michael. Discover the importance of traceability in the supply chain and how it ensures product safety, quality, and regulatory compliance. From backward traceability that tracks products from the consumer back to the supplier, to forward traceability that follows products through the supply chain to the end consumer, Clotilde and Michael explain it all.

Whether you're managing a small business or a large enterprise, this episode is packed with insights on optimizing traceability practices. Learn about the operational challenges and best practices for maintaining effective traceability, the benefits of using ERP systems like Odoo, and the importance of simplifying processes to reduce operational burden. Clotilde and Michael also share real-world examples and innovative solutions, emphasizing the flexibility and creativity Odoo offers in managing traceability.

Don't miss this informative discussion on ensuring product traceability and how Odoo can help streamline your supply chain operations!

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Concept and realization: Arthur Cariat
Recording and mixing: Lèna Noiset, Judith Moriset
Host: Dallas Dean

Transcript

CLOTILDE: 0:01

I think traceability, if you take it, generally speaking, you can use in fact the name of supply chain. During the product journey, a lot of things will happen and a few or many actors will do things. And the idea of traceability is really to know what happened during this product journey.

MICHAEL: 0:19

When we talk about backward traceability, it means that we really want to start from the consumer, from the product going to its origin in the supply chain, to really trace back the materials and the product towards actually the supplier usually, or the production.

CLOTILDE: 0:33

All these things could be considered as traceability, and you can add an extra layer of traceability when you add like lots of serial numbers.

DALLAS: 0:43

Hey there Odoo and welcome to our freshly baked episode of Planet Odoo, where we'll be speaking with Odoo experts Clotilde and Michael. I hope you like it and we'll learn some valuable knowledge regarding traceability in the supply chain. All right. Hello, Klotild. Hello, Michael. Thanks so much for joining us. So can you tell us a bit about just your background, who you are and what you're doing at Odoo?

CLOTILDE: 1:09

Uh, yeah. So my name is, uh, Clothilde. Uh, it has been more than four years now that I worked at Odoo as a business analyst. And I'm as well a team leader of the inventory expert team as a business analyst. So I implement a project for customers. And as an expert, I have different roles. So first of all, for projects with more complex supply chain, we provide some support. Could be for um pre-sales activity but also for implementation that are done by business analysts at Odoo, but also from partners. Uh, side to that we have another role that is sharing the knowledge. So we do, uh, we create and we give trainings to help, uh, all the community. So it could be, uh, partners, users and so on, um, to use really, uh, Odoo at uh, the full potential. And the last part that is really also important is that as we have a big variety of project, uh, every day we give feedback to R&D to improve the product so we are closer to each other to make it happen.

DALLAS: 2:21

Great.

MICHAEL: 2:22

Yeah. Hello. So my name is Michael. I'm, uh, the manager of the expertise team, uh, an Arduino xoar. Um, and I'm also working with Cloe on a day to day basis and the team members to actually bring the best Odoo knowledge we can about the, the apps that we have, but also bringing also business pieces of advice. And I guess I was invited here because I was probably one of the first, uh, inventory supply chain expert at Odoo. So I'm really glad I can participate in this podcast right now. Great.

DALLAS: 2:49

Yeah. Well, it's so, so great to have you both here today. So we're talking about traceability today. So could you just give us a brief explanation of what traceability means in a supply chain?

CLOTILDE: 3:03

I think traceability if you take it uh, generally speaking you can use in fact the name of supply chain because it's a chain. So during the the product journey, a lot of things will happen. And a few or many actors will do things. And the idea of traceability is really to know what happened during this product journey. Who has produced this product. And, and then uh, to who he has sold this product where this product has transited, does this product passed all the quality control and so on. And you really track at the end to who you have, uh, sold to which customer it has been sold. So you really take all the journey of this product, but can also think about traceability is also just to know how many units I have in this location. And, uh, you are just simply to know what is inside this pallet that is in front of me that is already, uh, filmed. So, um, all these things could be considered as traceability and you can add an extra layer of traceability when you add like lots of serial numbers. So lots will be group of product that has been produced together or you received together serial number. You go even more precisely where you identify uniquely each product. And in this case, you really have to say which one you add in your end and which lot. Which number.

MICHAEL: 4:30

Yeah, actually you really want to have an overview end to end, uh, from your supply chain here. Uh, and through which steps, actually the physical item went through. And also you want to use that information to actually take the appropriate action. So we will see that later. But actually we really want to, uh, use that info later on, uh, to take actions in the supply chain.

DALLAS: 4:52

Yeah. So that's interesting because I usually think of traceability as just the lots and serial numbers. But from what you're saying, it sounds like there's a large range of the level of detail for what can be considered traceability. But regardless of how specific we're being, why is it so important to ensure a good product traceability system?

CLOTILDE: 5:13

I suppose that if you take a plane to go to us, you would like that all the components that were used for the trip has been really tracked and that, uh, all the quality control have been passed and so on. So it's a question about safety, about quality that you ensure if you have a good traceability, sometimes it's just a choice of the company to make it, uh, transparent. And sometimes it's just not a choice. It's a regulations that you need to follow really specifically. And like in food industry or for for cars, for planes and so on, there are really rules that you need to fulfill to make sure that you, you can really deliver the product in the market. So in terms of the company really has a responsibility for the product they introduce in the market. And it's something very important. Uh, and for that traceability is really key.

DALLAS: 6:12

Yeah of course.

MICHAEL: 6:13

Yeah. And they do it like for all the reasons that Cloe mentioned. And they really want to be able to actually track, uh, we talk about uh, backward traceability and forward traceability. So when we talk about backward traceability, it means that we really want to start from the consumer, from the product going to it to its origin in the supply chain to really trace back the materials and the product, uh, towards actually the supplier usually or the production. And when you do actually forward traceability, you want to go towards the end consumer and see the steps and the different locations through which the product went through. And usually you will combine the two together. You will usually start with, uh, backward traceability to see which products were used in a production. And then you will do forward traceability to do a large product recall for, for instance, in case there is a quality issue in one of the products that you deliver to the customer, like a flow in an airplane, like, uh, like Chloe mentioned.

CLOTILDE: 7:05

And one thing that I would like to add is the fact that, as I said, so you have a responsibility, uh, as a company for the product you deliver in the market. And, uh, the thing is, if something goes wrong, uh, traceability will really help to take action because you will really know the history of the product, what happened, who, when, and so on. And, uh, thanks to that, you will identify which, uh, lot number, for example, uh, are defects and that you can then do some recalls check, uh, what was the reason behind and maybe adapt your process, for example, uh, to make sure that it won't happen again.

DALLAS: 7:45

Great. Yes. So that that backwards traceability is if we find out that there's a problem with a product, whether it's an airplane or something in like food industry, whatever it is not not to hammer on the airline safety recently, but it is, you know, it's an important, important topic that's really relevant today. So we can see, okay, there's a problem in this plane. This plane uses these parts that come from these factories. Go back to there and then we can use the forward traceability to see, okay, what other planes have. You know, products or, you know, subcomponents that came from this same place. So you can use that forward traceability there to prevent any further incidents. Yeah. Okay. Great. So obviously that makes sense. Why it's important. So what does it mean operationally speaking to then guarantee good traceability.

CLOTILDE: 8:38

As I said at the beginning. So you really need to know what happened at each step. So if you really need at each step to specify which lot, which cell number, uh, where moved from point A to point B, it adds an operational work in addition to um to say to identify, uh, what you really have in your hand. And so it adds a lot of, um, operational work for the users, for the operators to, to manage that. So. For a small company with a few products that are tracked. You can still manage that with an Excel file, for example. But if you have more and more traceability needs and more regulations as well to follow, it will begin to be really hard to manage that only manually, I would say, and an ERP will be needed to make sure that you are really compliant and that you really have the good data and the good information in your end. And so you really have to think about, okay, do I need to track and so on because and how many steps you will have because it will create a really an additional work for all the person. But. The as we said, is the advantage is now, you know and you ensure the quality of the product. You ensure all the safety. So it's important but it's for sure an extra work.

MICHAEL: 10:10

But I think even if you go for an ERP because you have traceability needs, you need to pay attention to the fact that the more details, the more information you'll you'll put in the system, the more time consuming it can actually become for, for for the end users. So as a I think as a decision maker, you need to pay attention to actually the threshold that you are making into the processes that you will keep outside of the software and the processes that you want to actually put in the software and usually had to do. What we say is that we want to keep things simple from the start. So when we start an implementation, we don't want to over complexify. And we see quite often in the inventory with Clothilde, when we do a implementation that the consultants, they tend to actually replicate as it is the current situation, uh, of the of the customer. And that makes it actually, in my opinion, a more complicated afterwards to implement. So you really need to weight which processes you will integrate in the system or not. I have a good example of that. Uh, when I did a, I did also a mistake when I did an implementation in the past, I was working for a UK customer, actually in the carpet industry and in their outbound process with their former system, they were only doing like two steps out, uh, in the outbound operations and we decided to go for five. So we went from 2 to 5 for the go live, which was actually a very bad idea because we had like a lot of bottlenecks, a lot of actions to take from the operators. And in the end, what we decided to do is to go back to a three step operations instead of a five. So it's a good example of let's be cautious about how far we go in the replication of the processes in the software. Even though we want a lot of information, a lot of traceability, it's not always necessary. It won't really bring a lot of added value to have those extra steps in the system. So we if I have a piece of advice here to any implementer there in the partner network, it's to say be cautious about the steps that you do and that you have in the in the system.

DALLAS: 12:00

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, in my time as a business analyst, yeah, we were very focused on that quick start implementation and how to simplify their process. And that's a huge goal of Odoo is to to save time to simplify the processes of businesses. And so, you know, then if we're adding steps we're just making somebody click buttons all day, which is not saving them time. Yeah. Yeah. So we've talked about Odoo. Now we've brought that into the conversation. How is Odoo able to really manage this need for traceability?

CLOTILDE: 12:34

Again, if we go from a more generally speaking, I would say that in Odoo, uh, you, you can track everything. So you can already know, uh, when it has been created by who and so on. And there is nothing that is, um, created from nowhere when we speak about stock, because there is always a counterpart location. So when, for example, you move a product from a vendor to your stock, you decrease in fact the quantity from this vendor location to increase the the stock in your stock location. So and you have the same process for example for inventory adjustment for manufacturing. So everywhere that you have a plus one you will have a minus one somewhere else. And if you want to go further in the traceability and so use a lot number and say a number, this is just an option that you can enable in the configurations. And then you can say which product, which seller number is tracked and if an expiry date, for example, is needed. And it's a bit hidden, but very important, you have uh under operation level, the possibility to say if from this operation you are able or not to create new serial number, or you can use only existing serial number. So it prevents you that, uh, for example, when you do a manufacturing operation and you pick the components that you create from nowhere, a component that you never received, it's little things, but really do the difference.

MICHAEL: 14:11

Yeah. I think this feature is really interesting, often forgotten, I think, uh, by the users, because you can really decide at which step in your flow with the operation types you want to track. I think a good example of that. If if you are in the electronics industry, uh, you might not want to actually track the serial number at the entrance, because when the track arrives, you don't actually have the time to encode the information directly in the system. So you just want to input the units so that you have the invoicing behind. And then it's only when you, uh, do the delivery at the exit, uh, on the outbound operation that you will actually assign the lots or serial numbers. So I think here it's an example where we don't track at the inbound level, but we do track at the outbound level. And we can have the opposite situation where, for instance, you are in the food industry, you. You want to make sure that you track expiry dates and lots up until the store, for instance. But at the store in the point of sale application, you don't really want to to track all the lot number that have been delivered to the customer. You rely, for instance, on the Fifo, um, removal strategy there. So here it's a good example of you can decide when you actually want to do the traceability, because sometimes it's not necessary to to do it.

DALLAS: 15:24

Yeah. That's great to have that flexibility because as as you're saying, you know, one company might want to just only create new serial numbers or lots on the delivery operation, whereas others might want to on their seats. So to have that flexibility is is obviously really important. And so personally, I spent more time in the accounting app than in inventory and other logistics apps. But what you talked about with things not being created out of thin air, that sounds a lot like a journal entry where one side is credited and one is debited. And you know, from the time that I have spent in inventory and manufacturing, I found it really interesting that we used these vendor locations and these virtual locations to accomplish essentially the same thing.

CLOTILDE: 16:10

Yeah. And if something goes wrong, like the user made a mistake, you can always track what happened, go in the history moves, check who did what, when. And usually, as Mikhail said, more and more you go to complex um, uh, configurations. More you risk to, uh, don't do some transfers and you, you miss some transfers. And so you create some negative quantities, for example. And thanks to all the things available in Odoo as information, you can really track and understand and make the inventory adjustment according to, uh, the current situation you have in front of you.

MICHAEL: 16:47

But actually about the choices of the lots and serial numbers, I think. Claire, you had a good example, uh, with your customer, with the production, um, where you didn't want to actually track, um, uh, always serial numbers, but you went for, uh, uh, a lot numbers at some point.

CLOTILDE: 17:04

Yeah. Yes. Uh, so it was a project for aircraft and, uh, and my stock was really cool because he, he really wanted to make things simple. So it's, uh, when you have, uh, this kind of customer in front of you, it's, uh, very helpful. It's the dream customer. Yeah, yeah. And, um, the thing is, when you are speaking about, uh, this kind of production, you have, uh, multi-level bombs, and you can really have a lot of levels, and sometimes some levels are interesting, sometimes less. And you have to make the, the tradeoff about which one you should keep for, for example, um, your nomenclature for engineers and which one will be for your operational work. So you can already reduce the work by reducing the number of levels. And then here what we have done is that when you do traceability by cell number, it means that you really need to carefully check which component is inside which serial number, and in this case, to ease the production. They have decided to, uh, add for example, a next level but in lot number to simplify the production and add the serial number only, uh, at the end, for example, to simplify, operationally speaking, in Odoo the work, because, for example, it will make sure that everything will be produced, uh, by lot. And then when we arrive at the last step and we really need to assign the cell number, it's, uh, less work with less operations and steps in on the bomb. And thanks to that, it's simplified, really, the work for the user.

DALLAS: 18:48

Okay, great. So yeah, the simplification obviously has been a big, big theme today. Do you have any other best practices that you want to share.

CLOTILDE: 18:57

And just one thing that we haven't uh, speaking about is package. Because when we speak about traceability, often we put package in the same, same bag, I would say because the pack is the package has a unique number like the cell number. And thanks to the package, you will be able to move products. It could be the same or several products, uh, different products inside from one place to another. And um, at each moment you will identify uniquely what, uh, is inside. So it's a kind of, say, a number. And sometimes you can combine both notion together to go further in the terms of traceability, like also the same idea, like the tracking number that you have on your parcel, uh, that you will, uh, uh, send to your customer.

MICHAEL: 19:44

Yeah. The packages I think it's a traceability mean that it's, uh, very much overlooked, uh, into Odoo we directly think of lots of serial numbers. Um, and going back to that UK customers, we, we we also decided to combine a lot. For the production batch that came from the supplier, but we wanted to have actually the package as a unique identifier for in that case, because we were in the carpet industry for the role. So we used the package as the unique identifier, and that helped us actually to track the roll movements throughout the entire inventory up until actually the the cut, because they of course, cut to different sizes, uh, the carpets for the customer. And we had that traceability up to the production level. Uh, so it was also a traceability mean that we used, uh, in that project.

DALLAS: 20:33

Interesting. So we have the importance of packages. Were there any other kind of like best practices that you all would recommend?

CLOTILDE: 20:41

Go simple. I think it will be when we speak about traceability, it means as well extra work because you need to specify which slot, which cell number. So if you reduce the number of steps for the inbound or for the outbound process, you already decrease a lot of uh, uh, work for um, for the users. So really think about the necessity. Sometimes it's just a question about renaming the operation and call it received and quality control instead of, uh, having received. And then a second operation that is quality control and then a third one that is stored in the storage zone. But so sometimes it's just this kind of thing that will really allow you to simplify the processes for, um, the users. And again, in the same ID, if you go for more locations, it had extra work. And if you have a lot of locations and a lot of serial number and lots, and you need to make sure that the users will manage everything, don't do mistakes. Uh, it begins to be complicated. And if in this case, I think one good way to help the user is maybe to use a barcode scanner, because thanks to that, it will ensure that what he has scan is really what he has in front of him. Uh, because when you do manual encoding, you could do some mistakes because it goes fast. And, um, and yeah, I think one thing that is, uh, more and more used and uh, ask is, uh, GS1. So it's, um, I would say it's an organism that's propose, uh, rules for the supply chain worldwide speaking that allow to put different information in one barcode. So in one barcode you could have, for example, the information about the, the barcode of the product. So the EAN for example. And uh you can add for example the lot number how many units and the expiry date. And so instead of scanning each information separately in one scan you have all this information done. But you have to make sure that the supplier, uh, has this kind of barcode in his company or in new company. If you don't, the supplier doesn't have it. You need to, uh, do it on your site to continue the chain.

MICHAEL: 23:08

Yeah. Uh, and I think I think in terms of best practices, definitely. Like we said, uh, don't try to replicate 100% the physical processes, but I think we insisted enough on that. And I think also it shows here that actually every option, every configuration that you have in the inventory app can be a traceability tool. Uh, so you can go from, uh, locations from operation types to lot serial numbers or even packages. Uh, everything helps you actually to have your traceability, uh, into Odoo. Uh, I even think of a case, uh, that I didn't personally work on. But instead of using, like, serial numbers or lots, uh, they decided to go for product variants, uh, because they had a lot of attributes, a lot of values, and every product was a custom one. And they were sure that it was a unique one so they could decide to get rid actually of serial numbers or lot numbers by just using, uh, variants because they, they had plenty of them. It was custom products. So, uh, just to show here that actually every configuration, every mean into Odoo, uh, is actually a traceability tool. So you should consider every option when you are facing a, I would say a traceability case, uh, in your day to day life.

DALLAS: 24:16

That's really interesting. One I've never thought of variants being, you know, considered in traceability. But yeah, I guess if you have a totally custom workflow. Yeah, every product variant, every example is going to be totally unique. So yeah that works.

CLOTILDE: 24:32

Yeah. And so like as we have a lot of tools in Odoo to manage the traceability, like we said, lot number, cell number package, uh, location variants and so on. I think with the inventory app, what is really cool is that you can have an inventive brain. I would say to to think about solution out of the box. There is no one solution. There are a lot of solutions that could fit the company. And you just have to go for the simplest one that can fit for the company and that for the user makes sense when they do operations, because if you do a configuration but the user, uh, doesn't know what he has to do because it's unclear, uh, it doesn't it's not helpful. So you have to do the trade off about making sure that it's, uh, enough clear for the user in terms of what he has to do and make it simple and so on and so. Well, it's, um, a mix of things that you really, uh, that is. It's why also we like this app. It's all the possibilities behind. Yeah, I.

MICHAEL: 25:37

Totally agree on that. I, I think we are really fine. We like supply chain. We like the inventory app because we have many options in front of us, and one customer is not another. So that's definitely each time, uh, a uh, a challenge I would say to, to do the implementation for the customer.

DALLAS: 25:51

Yeah. And, you know, a lot of options for creativity, like you said. So, you know, if anyone else has any, any creative examples of how they have accomplished, you know, ensuring good traceability, we we want to hear about it. Let us know what what we missed the variants one was was a great one. So as we're talking about the, you know, different features of Odoo traceability, that leads us perfectly to our last question. And that is what about Odoo 18? Are there some improvements regarding the traceability topic? What what can we look forward to?

CLOTILDE: 26:25

I'm already very, very excited by this new version. I think it will be a big version for inventory and we will have, uh, this time our day, uh, for during the audio experience. Uh, so there will be an inventory of a supply chain day. And in terms of traceability, I think one that was really were waited for a long time is valuation per lot and by sale number. So it's finally there for Odoo 18. And they made some improvement, uh, to go further for the traceability in intercompany flows and a lot of other things to all the things, operationally speaking, that are a bit more, uh, Navy work for the user. They would like to, uh, simplify it. So there are a few other options to make it simpler for the user.

DALLAS: 27:13

Yeah. So when we're moving, uh, tracked components or tracked products with lots of serial numbers from one company to another in the same database, we don't have to re encode all of that. Yeah.

CLOTILDE: 27:25

Because before it was specific per company. So you had to recreate each time you lot of sale number. And you could make some mistakes when you encode the, the, the the the lot number or the sale number. Great.

DALLAS: 27:37

That sounds like a cool one. And then I know a lot of people have been eager to get their hands on the inventory valuation per lot or serial number. So that's that's going to be well received I'm sure.

CLOTILDE: 27:48

Yeah. Some claps. Yeah.

DALLAS: 27:51

Excellent. Well thank you both so much for taking the time to come and speak with us about traceability today. It was so great having you on and we look forward to having you again sometime soon.

EVERYONE: 28:00

Thank you. Thank you for the invitation.

DALLAS: 28:03

I hope you enjoyed this episode with Clotilde and Michael. That's all for this one. This has been your pal Dao. I'll see you next time.