Odoo Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

The Odoo Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) helps you to communicate more efficiently accross multiple departments. The most important functionalities for a manufacturing business is to manage the lifecycle of a product, which means that from inception stage to the deliver or the disposal stage of a product. A unified system like Odoo has recording all their product related data and manufactures have the access to the different versions of their product at any point in time. So that these datas can also be share to different departments to maintain the financial planings.

Odoo PLM

The Odoo Product Lifecycle Management feature aims to manage the entire product data, maintain the Bill of Materials (BoM), revisions and track product lifecycle based on engineering change orders (ECO).

Configuration: First you have to install the Manufacturing module as well as PLM module.

PLM Overview: once installed the PLM module, we can see the Overview and here is the total number of changes on each ECO.

Engineering Change Orders(ECO):

Here we can create ECO Tags, Types, stages.

To create ECO Tags:

Odoo Product Lifecycle Management

To create ECO Types:

ECO Stages:

We can add many stages of ECO type via adding columns. This is very similar to the CRM module and Project module. But an extra option is here, One can add an approval option for each stage.

Here are the 4 ECO stages:

1. New - This stage indicates that we are creating a new ECO.
2. In progress - This stage indicates when the ECOs are in progress.
3. Validated - This stage is the final stage to apply changes based on ECO apply on selection.
4. Effective – This stage is used for the confirmed ECOs. Here one can apply any changes, this will be marked as the final stage in the settings, also select allow to apply changes for applying the ECO changes in PLM app.

Odoo Product Lifecycle Management

Generating a Engineering Change Order(ECO):

Bill of material of a product(cabinet with doors) in manufacturing:

Creating Engineering Change order(ECO):

You need to fill up the above field, you could have a short summary of the changes, Choose the ECO Type, ApplyOn Bill of Materials or Products only, Then if you choose the product the Bill of Materials field will automatically filled up. After filling the required fields save the changes and click the Start New Revision button for the further processes.

To Update the BoM:

Click the UPDATE BOM button and the BoM will be updated, which can be seen in the BOM Revision smart button.

And here we can update the Components of the product like this.

After adding the components save the changes, check the BoM changes tab.

Here we can see, The recently added components. Now ECOs state is In progress.

Then the stage of ECO is moved from In progress stage to Validated Stage through drag and drop.
Now we can assign the Administrator to approve the changes. Then click the Apply Changes button and the stage will be moved from Validated stage to Effective stage.