The warehouse and inventory management is based on a hierarchical location structure, from warehouses to storage bins. The best thing about a robust inventory system is double-entry functionality, it allows organizations to manage all kind of inventories, such as customers, suppliers as well as manufacturing inventories.

OpenERP is fully capable of managing lots and serial numbers which helps you to ensure compliance with the traceability requirements. The Odoo Warehouse Management System (WMS) allows you to optimize important warehouse processes like procurements, shipping, and replenishment functions by employing powerful system logic to select the best locations and sequences.  Let us look at the features of the Odoo WMS:

Managing Inventory Structures

The Location Structure menu opens the warehouses structure within your physical locations, partner locations, or virtual locations. And to map significant business operations, like customer deliveries, inventory Profit-Loss, etc. you can create counterpart locations. Location structuring enables you to analyze your stock operations in detail, which ultimately gives you a good insight into your warehouse organization.

Products

Items that any individual or organization can sell and purchase known as products, that could be a raw material, consumable products, a stackable product or even a service. You can define procurement and supply logistics. At the time of shipment, you can simply define product paths while applying logistic rules by linking different locations. This is the best approach to manage dispatched products. Odoo provides you features to set customer and Manufacturing lead times, define warranties, procurement Locations, and measurement units for your products.

Stock Availability

Odoo has the facility or option that allows you to check your stock levels for various items for any location that you want to know, at any given point of time. You can calculate both the Real Stock (the actual physical quantity present in your Warehouse) and the Virtual Stock (calculated as real stock – outgoing + incoming) for all the physical locations. Virtual Stocks are extremely useful as it allows your salespeople to see what they can sell.  You can easily view the Future Stock Forecasts which is based on expected stock changes as well as confirmed purchase/Sales/ production Orders.  Furthermore, get information about stock lead times as well as its locations.

Inventories

Inventory operations involve managing the stock levels and their movement by entering the actual current quantities into the system. Just in a single click you will get a full analysis of inventory locations, for a particular period of time. Odoo gives you the flexibility to start your inventory from scratch or to get quantities from the system and then change them after checking the actual stock quantity. Odoo supports the concept of Periodical Inventory which allows you to check stock operations on a periodic basis.

Automatic Procurements

Procurement orders in Odoo are automatically generated. You can set Minimum Stock rules in Odoo to help you avoid out of stock situations, stocks will be reordered automatically when they fall below the minimum set stock level. The system will automatically create a purchase order that will just need to be confirmed by the purchaser. In case of configuration issues, procurement exceptions will be created, that can be fixed automatically by the system or can be corrected by us. Odoo also allows you to create Manual procurement orders.

Incoming Shipments

The Incoming Shipments represent all suppliers orders to be received, generated by the purchase orders confirmations. Odoo also allows you to manage back orders, automated inventory valuation, serial numbers, and quality control, control invoices to suppliers, Print packing lists, add information on production lots & packs, etc. Odoo supports reception control by order lines and allows you to process multi-order receptions, and process partial and complete shipments with ease. The various features in Odoo allow you to receive and handle products rapidly and with great flexibility.

Outgoing Shipments

Outgoing shipments are generated by confirmed sales orders and based on manual data entry or according to a sales order or by-product You can send goods to your customers even if you forget to enter your stocks by simply forcing availability for negative stocks and doing an inventory correction later. Orders can be scheduled using Automatic Schedulers or you can use ‘Just in Time’ feature to schedule each order in real time after it has been confirmed. Odoo allows you to configure Outgoing Delivery stock moves and also to define your own logistic flows. You can easily handle partial shipments and customer returns easily in Odoo.

Traceability & Production Lots

Internal Stock Moves

In Odoo you can configure logistic rules to move internal products between several locations in your warehouses for each product. Stock Moves in Odoo can be set configured to Automatic Stock Moves or Manual Stock Moves, Odoo by default supports the Pushed Flow Logistic method to automatically move products internally based on location. You are also allowed to configure the Pulled Flow method and base your moves on the procurement orders. You can also go for Manual stock moves for reorganization purposes in your warehouse

Financial Inventory management

In Odoo, the double-entry structure of locations enables a very precise correspondence between stocks and accounts and creates a strong coherence. Each stock movement also generates a corresponding accounting entry in an accounting journal to ensure that the two systems can stay in permanent synchronization. You can manage your stocks through journals, manage transportation costs, confirm/cancel multiple orders, invoices and quotations in a single go and do much more.

Reports

Inventory Valuation is a report that contains the monetary value of your stock quantity for each location of your warehouses structure and for your real as well as virtual stock. Inventory by location gives you a report of the product quantities by location. Dates of latest inventories by product report gives you the list of all inventories by date and product for any control purpose.

Managing Imports/Exports

Odoo makes it easy for you to manage Import/Export operations with foreign companies very efficiently. With Odoo you can know where your products are, know your product value in transits, know the lead times for their arrival and validate stock moves at each port and customs arrival. Calculating lead times and Stock Forecasts allow you to estimate the arrival of incoming products, so that you can respond to the customer’s need as precisely as possible.

Multi Company Environment

The multi-company environment in Odoo allows you to manage operations from different companies with different warehouses, customers, suppliers, products and different locations. You can easily configure the various logistics for multi company environment like configuring company structure, defining products, managing stocks, locations, storages, warehouses, Accounting Charts, Users, Suppliers & Customers, process flows, Sales, Purchases, Delivery and many other features.