Running a foundry on Odoo: tracking each heat from melt to casting
A foundry does not have a fixed bill of materials. The melt changes with every heat. Here is how we model that in Odoo so the true cost of each casting becomes visible.
Standard manufacturing software assumes a product is made from a fixed bill of materials. A foundry breaks that assumption every day. The charge mix for a heat depends on the scrap and returns available, the lab result after the first sample changes the additives, and the power drawn by the furnace varies from batch to batch. If the system cannot record what actually went into each heat, the cost of a casting is a guess.
The heat is the unit of work
The first design decision is to treat the heat, not the casting, as the unit the shop floor records. Each heat gets its own record with:
- the furnace, the shift and the melter in charge
- the charge actually loaded: pig iron, steel scrap, returns, alloys and additives, by weight
- lab results per sample, and the corrections made after each one
- power or fuel consumed, read from the meter at start and end
- the liquid metal tapped
A bill of materials set at melting time
In Odoo terms, the heat behaves like a manufacturing order whose components are entered when they are charged, rather than planned in advance. A simple shop-floor screen lets the melter add each material as it goes in, with large buttons and few fields, because nobody types well wearing gloves next to a furnace.
Pouring links metal to castings
When the metal is poured, the heat is linked to the casting orders it fed. That one link is what makes the numbers work. Material and energy are spread over the castings that heat produced, so each casting carries its real metal cost, its share of power, and the heat number for traceability.
What management gets
- cost per heat and per casting, built from what was actually used
- yield: liquid metal tapped against good castings produced
- power per tonne, by furnace and by shift
- traceability from any casting back to its heat, its charge and its lab results
None of this needs Odoo Enterprise. It is a focused extension on Community, built to follow Odoo's own manufacturing flow so it upgrades cleanly. The hard part is not the code. It is sitting with the melting team long enough to understand what they really record, and keeping the screen as simple as their day demands.
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