Now that we have talked about using Odoo's Point of Sale application as well as Purchasing, it is time to move along to the next piece in our puzzle of setting up our small food industry business, Hibou Eats. 

The next piece, or should I say pieces, are inside the Inventory and Manufacturing applications. 

A long time ago I was a certified Sandwich Artist with a pretty big chain named after a mass transit system. While working there, when I wasn't on the front lines building sandwiches, I was in the back working on prep kits. Back then, we would go into our coolers and just make a list with pen and paper of what we needed to make. It was archaic! Now, with Odoo, you can use the Inventory app to track the usage of all of your products, even when things aren't being pulled from a cooler to give directly to a customer. 

Inside of the Manufacturing application, we can create a Bill of Materials (a BoM), or a BoM Kit. It works like this: Let's say we have a kit assembled for the vegetable portion of a cheeseburger, so that when someone orders that burger, we can just grab a preassembled set of lettuce, tomato, onion, you get the idea. Now these kits can be made ahead of time, either in the morning or the night before, by using a piece of lettuce, 2 slices of tomato, and 4 rings of onion in our kit, each time a kit is produced, those items are pulled from and decremented from your Inventory. It's a great way to help gauge when certain products need to be reordered in order to keep everything in stock. 

Manufacturing BoM kits can be taken one step further by setting up By Products. In the example above, obviously each tomato isn't going to produce 2 slices and then we throw the rest out. Instead, we can set up our kit to reflect that each tomato yields 6 slices, each onion gives us 10 rings and so on. We can then use the leftover "by product" to assemble more kits to get the most out of every product we use. 

Let's take a quick look to see how this works in Odoo.

I'm only scratching the surface here, but fear not! We offer hands-on training to teach you to use the tools that Odoo gives us. You can schedule an appointment and set up a time to explain your unique business needs or ask for a quick demo of Odoo's apps. We also have Inventory and Manufacturing documents in our ever-growing library of documentation, where we post Odoo version-specific explanations and workflows of the many components to many Odoo applications. If that still isn't enough, we also offer Courses!