Did Odoo Stock Just Revolutionize the Industry Again? - Roadmap Odoo 17

Olivier Colson: 0:00

Hello, Odooers, and welcome back for another episode of our Tech and Dev series. Today we take you behind the scenes again, but this time teasing some of our upcoming inventory features for Odoo 17. Loved by the users, our inventory application changed the industry, yet we found ways to improve it. So it's about to get even better. Whether you're working in the logistics industry or you are an enthusiastic Odoo user, this episode is for you. Ready? Let's dive in. So today, our guest is Thomas Deleval. Hello, Thomas. Hello. So who are you exactly? Can you tell people?

Thomas Deleval: 0:34

I'm the product owner. So my role is to decide what are the new features that are coming in Odoo and when they are coming, basically, um, we are actually quite a squad of product owners at Odoo. We have different scopes. Mine is to decide the features for apps, inventory, barcode, purchase, and shipping connectors.

Olivier Colson: 1:01

So you see the things Odoo needs to add to its features. You decide for the future.

Thomas Deleval: 1:06

Yes, exactly. We try to test a lot. Also, uh, treating the, the different feedbacks we receive, uh, internally or externally and try to improve the product like this.

Olivier Colson: 1:18

And then the software grows. So what is coming for Odoo 17? Can you tell us?

Thomas Deleval: 1:22

Actually, we didn't reinvent the wheel. Um. Uh, inventory is an app that is already very complex. And what we try to do is to make it more easy. Uh, mainly. On top of that, we added some nice small features, but the goal was to make the existing more easy to use.

Olivier Colson: 1:48

I think it's always been a big focus, you know, to try to have the like the cleanest possible thing, functionally speaking. I mean, so less buttons, less clicks, less complicated stuff for the user. And so that I mean, the average person can just do the flow without having to understand everything that's around.

Thomas Deleval: 2:05

Yes. And in this case, in this particular case of inventory, it's quite difficult because it's it's not like accounting, for instance, where accounting is ruled by conventions in each country. In inventory, there are conventions because, yeah, a product cannot be twice with the same serial number, and it can't be at two locations at the same time or something like that. Even if we allow it, it's a bit the far west. Every company does its own workflow. It has its own way of storing products and moving them around the warehouse and the different locations that they have. And so, the app is very versatile, and it's it can be very, very, very complex to very, very easy. So basically, you just receive stuff from your, your vendors and you, you send it to your, your customers. But what happens in the meantime can be super complex.

Olivier Colson: 3:10

And how do you handle this kind of specific magic that needs to happen within each company? Do you like force them to well, you know, be into the normal flow and have something standard for Odoo? Or is the goal on the contrary, to have something like the most flexible possible and really let them do whatever they want as long as they configure it beforehand?

Thomas Deleval: 3:34

Yeah, I think we cannot ask a company to change their supply chain. It's it's a bit hard. I know. You tell.

Olivier Colson: 3:41

Me. You're the expert. I'm just asking questions, you know?

Thomas Deleval: 3:43

So, um. Yeah, if. If you are a very complex warehouse, of course you have complex workflows. It's not like having two shelves at the back of your store and having a, I don't know, ten warehouses each, each of more than several thousand square meters. So you have to be efficient in those warehouses. And to be efficient, you know, you have to know precisely where stuff is stored, who has to pick it when. And also you have to replenish this. So you have thousands of different products that you have to handle. Everything must be automated. So, uh, so, so the magic happens through the configuration. Basically, it's just a configuration. And we don't, for some point we try to direct the customer to the most easy way. But it's actually their call. We offer a lot of possibilities, even if people always ask for more. But um, but no, we don't force users to, to use one parser or another. It's, it's totally their call.

Olivier Colson: 4:55

So could you give us a first example of a new feature coming for Odoo 17 with something that will well, you know, push the boundaries of what inventory could do in 17 and. Just make it more powerful now.

Thomas Deleval: 5:11

Push the boundaries. Um, okay. So we added, for instance, a feature that is, uh, to select a different route per shipping method. So a shipping method you can have DHL or UPS, or you can deliver by yourself, or you can have another kind of shipping method which is um, delivered to that specific store of my company. And in such case, the product doesn't have to move the same way. If you deliver through DHL, it goes out of your warehouse and DHL pick picks it up, and then it's sent to the customer. But when you have to send it to a shop, you have to pick it in the warehouse or eventually check if there is a stock in the shop. If not, pick it in the warehouse and send it to the shop. So that's a new thing that we added, which is kind of powerful for a lot of use, I believe.

Olivier Colson: 6:15

Yeah. More more flexibility again, indeed. Uh, um. I don't know. Um, do you want to give more explanations on that, or is there other features around that that you would like to explain? Or do we move on to the next point?

Thomas Deleval: 6:25

That's not the main feature that we developed. That's one of the features that I would say that's a cool feature. That's a nice thing that we added. Um, another feature that's nice is we improve the way we handle serial numbers and lots, uh, we made some efforts in that. Um, for instance, now you can add specific properties on lots and serials. For instance, if you are in the business of steel where you have a lot of different qualities of steel and characteristics, and then you can add this. And to your lots.

Olivier Colson: 7:06

And how do you do that? I mean, with studio or.

Thomas Deleval: 7:09

No, it's not studio. That's where the magic happens.

Olivier Colson: 7:12

Within the stock.

Thomas Deleval: 7:13

App. Yeah, it's directly in the app. We introduce this kind of property in the 16 in the project app, for instance, where you can on a specific project at different properties for each task of this project. Here it's the same thing. If you add properties to a lot or serial number, those properties will exist for the other lots of the same product, but you can change it on each lot, of course.

Olivier Colson: 7:42

And what kind of properties could you maybe just an example of.

Thomas Deleval: 7:47

You can add checkboxes, you can add a select field, you can add a free text. So there are many, many possibilities. So. Okay, a link, a number. Well, I don't know all of them by heart, but there are a lot of them. Anything.

Olivier Colson: 8:06

So it's not just a field with it's.

Thomas Deleval: 8:08

Like a mini studio. It's like.

Olivier Colson: 8:09

Okay, yeah, it's the inventory.

Thomas Deleval: 8:11

Studio and you can search on it and yeah, you can filter on it as well.

Olivier Colson: 8:16

Okay, Pretty neat. Next feature?

Thomas Deleval: 8:19

Still on the lots. It's now possible. Well, especially for serial numbers. If you have them in several locations, you can view it in a Kanban view per location and move them easily with just a drag and drop. So if you want to to store products like this.

Olivier Colson: 8:41

How did you do that before?

Thomas Deleval: 8:42

You have to create a transfer basically.

Olivier Colson: 8:44

So it was really going through a form view and creating a new object manually. Now you just move.

Thomas Deleval: 8:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to create. You have to create a new transfer, an Internet transfer to say, okay, I move it to that location or delivery. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, and still on lots and serials, you can now, uh, when you do a receipt, you can also import the, the expiry date and the quantity that you received. So for instance, if you receive 10,000 thousands of units of a product tracked by serial number, uh, it's usually you receive from your, your vendor an Excel sheet with all the serial numbers and potentially the expiry date. If it exists. Then you just have to copy the, the, the content of this Excel sheet and paste it in Odoo and all the lines are created automatically.

Olivier Colson: 9:46

So cool. Again, um, other things?

Thomas Deleval: 9:50

Uh, still on pickings. Um, so that last uh, feature I talked about was about the picking. And now in the picking, we try to beat. We reinvented it a bit to make it more easy to use make less errors. So in the past, for instance, if you were creating an internal transfer, you say, Oh, I moved ten units of this product from location to location B, but you have no guarantee that you have that in location A on the start mistakes so you can make mistakes and create artificial negative. Negative quantities in your stock, which is, of course not reflective of the reality.

Olivier Colson: 10:33

It's a big deal when you're dealing with such kind of business because yeah, you, you could create things magically in locations where they don't exist and.

Thomas Deleval: 10:41

Then you realize that you're not working in any way for that. So, um, so for all the, the, the stock move lines, you can have more flexibility now because you can see what you have in stock and you can also reserve what you want. So if a customer asks you, yeah, I want this serial number and this one because they are specific to them and they chose this one, then you create your sell order on confirmation. You can go on the transfer and already reserve those two in your stock so nobody can take it directly.

Olivier Colson: 11:21

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So cool. More control, actually.

Thomas Deleval: 11:24

And if you if you don't want to reserve everything, let's say, for instance, you have, uh, 30 product in stock, but you have three customers wanting 20 each, then you can reserve just ten per customer.

Olivier Colson: 11:38

How was it working before?

Thomas Deleval: 11:40

Uh, the first one got 20 and the second one? Ten and the last one. Nothing. Okay.

Olivier Colson: 11:45

So that's actually a very big improvement because you can give this flexibility and have I mean, something, you know, some kind of compromise for all your customers so that there isn't one getting everything and the other one's still.

Thomas Deleval: 11:57

You have to do it manually.

Olivier Colson: 11:59

But that makes.

Thomas Deleval: 12:00

Sense. It's possible to do it while it was very difficult in the past.

Olivier Colson: 12:05

So you can handle tricky cases where maybe some products might be difficult to get like right now and now you have enough to get some to multiple people. But yeah, compromise again. Yeah.

Thomas Deleval: 12:16

And we also try to we are also trying to merge the, the immediate transfers and the planned transfers. So uh, in the past if depending the context that you are where you were when you were creating a new transfer, sometimes it was creating a plan transfer, sometimes an immediate transfer. It was very confusing because also not everybody knows the difference. When you start with Odoo, it's kind of difficult to understand what's the difference between, uh, but once you understand that the plan transfer is something that you want to do in the future, so you have a demand for products that need to be reserved, and then when you do the transfer, you do it. And the immediate transfer is something that you basically register afterwards. You say, okay, I moved, you just went to your stock, You move the pallet from that product from A from a location A to location B, and then you register the transfer and say, okay, I did that. So, uh, and so no, it's possible to switch from immediate to uh, to, to plan transfer.

Olivier Colson: 13:29

So if I get it, well any place where it was possible to create a transfer, so be it planned or not. Now you, you, it's always the same screen, though, where you can switch between both. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So more control and you don't have to be aware of what will happen when you click that button. Yeah, exactly. Indeed, it makes sense to have something more homogeneous like that. Um, uh, are we done with speaking or have we forgotten something?

Thomas Deleval: 13:51

Um, I think we are done. Oh, one last thing. Maybe very, very nice as well. Um, it's not directly with the picking, although, yeah, it's at the end of the picking. Basically, when you validate your transfer, uh, depending on the type of transfer, sometimes you want to print documents. Let's say you are in at a packing station. You want to print the content of the package, you want to print a shipping label, maybe you want to print, um, the package label, all those things.

Olivier Colson: 14:31

A lot of sticked onto the package, a lot.

Thomas Deleval: 14:32

Of documents that have to be printed and potentially on different printers because labels are printed on a zebra printer or other A4 documents are printed on a regular printer and it's now possible to configure for each picking, uh, each picking type what you want to be printed at the validation of the transfer. Okay. So it's very, uh, very practical and um, on their side, the IOT Team also is developing a feature where you can, as a user tell on a new session. Okay, I print on this printers today because if you have several packing packing stations, you have to say, okay, I'm at this packing station.

Olivier Colson: 15:24

And so before you didn't have any control on that?

Thomas Deleval: 15:26

No. Basically any each report had to be printed on the same printer.

Olivier Colson: 15:35

Okay. So as you say at the beginning, again.

Thomas Deleval: 15:37

Most customer have to rely on a on an on an extra component to do that. Mhm.

Olivier Colson: 15:41

Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Okay. So it's good we support that natively now. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. All right. So we're done with pickings. Yeah.

Thomas Deleval: 15:49

I think so. Next point. Uh, I already talked about the routes by shipping methods. Uh, regarding the routes we have, we have improved a bit. The, the, um, the make-to-order route. So make-to-order was in the past archived as a route because, uh, some people tended to abuse it. Sometimes you use M2 so the make to order when it's not necessary and when you use it wrongly, it can create to quite some troubles.

Olivier Colson: 16:26

Could you give more details about that?

Thomas Deleval: 16:27

So a make to order is basically a chain. It goes from a demand from your customer to at the end a purchase order generated to for your the vendor of the product. And in between there are different transfer, different depending on your configuration. It could be to transfer one receipt, one one delivery, but it can happen a lot of in between and um, if you break the chain at the moment. So let's say you receive the product and you remarked there is a, a default, so you scrap the product. Sure. But you want to, you want to to, to buy a new one. But then this new purchase order that you created is not linked anymore to the sale order. So your chain is broken and your delivery looks like it's always waiting for another operation. That will never happen. Basically the first receipt. Okay. And, uh.

Olivier Colson: 17:31

And if I get it, Well, now we restore that link somehow.

Thomas Deleval: 17:34

No, no, we don't restore the link. Okay, What do we do? Uh, we do. Simpler than that. If the. The, um. The link is broken, then it becomes an empty link. It's. There is no link with a dead transfer, I would say.

Olivier Colson: 17:48

So we kind of unlock the situation. Yeah.

Thomas Deleval: 17:50

We unlock the situation. So.

Olivier Colson: 17:53

All right, it's more improvement.

Thomas Deleval: 17:54

But, uh, but I think a lot of people will appreciate that.

Olivier Colson: 17:59

Sure. I, if I, I mean, if it got them in, in, in setups where, where something was waiting, something that would never happen, Uh, you're just like, fixing inconsistencies, actually.

Thomas Deleval: 18:08

Yeah, actually, you could, you could force it anyway, but it was misleading because.

Olivier Colson: 18:14

You're doing it automatically, which is always better. All right.

Thomas Deleval: 18:17

Um, next, uh, we are currently working on the stock for rental, uh, people loving the rental up. Uh, a lot of them complain that you cannot use the actual transfers from stock. Uh, so when you generate a rental order, there is no delivery that is generated in stock. It's just you go into the rental app and you say receive pickup the products and. It's just moves that are created, but there is no actual transfer. And, uh, some companies were complaining if you rent, for instance, um, uh, audio systems or something, usually when you, the products are returned, something happened. Quality check, for instance. So that is not possible currently. So, um, so um, so that's a, that's a good improvement so that you.

Olivier Colson: 19:21

Can have this additional step now.

Thomas Deleval: 19:23

Yeah. And also the rental product would work with the forecast report, for instance.

Olivier Colson: 19:29

Okay, cool. Um. Cool. Um.

Thomas Deleval: 19:33

Next part. Talking about forecast reports. Oh, yeah, we improved it as well. Okay. Um, in the past, it was not working well when you were doing the multi-step operations, and now we are showing what is actually in transit. So if you are in multi-step, for instance, multi-step delivery when uh, the products are received but already reserved for the first step, then the products are in transit that are somewhere between your stock and the customer, but it's now visible. And you can also reserve the peak operation, for instance. That was not possible in the past. Okay, cool, cool.

Olivier Colson: 20:20

Um, additional things with that? I don't think so.

Thomas Deleval: 20:25

Um, no, no, no. Um, let's talk maybe a bit about barcodes.

Olivier Colson: 20:32

All right. What can you tell us about barcodes? You sound like it's really your passion. Yeah.

Thomas Deleval: 20:41

I like it a lot. You know, that's what I like in inventory. In barcode is. Yeah, the warehouse management. It actually covers a lot of different types of users, from the most qualified people, like the supply chain manager who organizes all the routes and the setup, to the lowest qualified people of the company. Usually, the just the guy picking the products on the shelves. So those guys sometimes don't speak your language because they are temporary workers. They don't know how stuff works and you have to prevent them.

Olivier Colson: 21:22

They need to use it.

Thomas Deleval: 21:23

Yeah, they need to use it. And um, and so that's why we introduced barcode. It's like an inventory app. It's actually a customer-customized version of inventory, but for usage on a mobile device, but also very easy to use.

Olivier Colson: 21:45

Okay. And so, what do we change for barcodes, then?

Thomas Deleval: 21:48

Um. What we did is to offer less possibility to make mistakes. That's the worst thing. Imagine if you ask your your employee to store a product, A on shelf A, and then it stores it on shelf X or Y. You never know where your product is. Nobody knows it apart. The guys who the guy who put it. I don't know where he decided so. So we we have to force them to work on the correct workflow because otherwise it's it's a nightmare in stock when something is lost. Imagine something lost in a warehouse of several thousand square meters.

Olivier Colson: 22:34

It's over.

Thomas Deleval: 22:35

It's over. Yeah. You may find it back six months later or something.

Olivier Colson: 22:41

So, um, how, how, how do we improve that? How do we avoid that?

Thomas Deleval: 22:46

So, now, we added some checks to avoid this. So basically you can decide. We introduced that in 16 already, but we improved it. So before, it was possible that if you have to pick a product in location A and then another one in location B and you scanned location A, then the first product and then the second product. There was no error. It was like it took the second product in location A and now you can there is a check. Okay. Are you sure you checked? You picked it in location. B please scan. Uh, please re scan location A to confirm that you actually picked it in a different location.

Olivier Colson: 23:36

So you can still do it if it's really what you want to do. Because for some reason.

Thomas Deleval: 23:39

Yeah, it can.

Olivier Colson: 23:40

Happen. Uh, but you have something telling you. Whoa, whoa.

Thomas Deleval: 23:43

Something you should. What you're doing, that's not what you're supposed to do. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

Olivier Colson: 23:47

Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. Okay so that's good. I think it, it's like the best of two worlds because restricting people too much wouldn't work, I guess. And on the other hand, indeed, just letting them do whatever they want and not checking anything and assuming it's correct it's not. Yeah.

Thomas Deleval: 24:00

Basically, you can still do what you want, but it's less practical than doing the regular thing. So.

Olivier Colson: 24:07

But it makes sense again because if the regular thing is less practical than what you actually do, maybe what you do should become the regular thing. So. Yeah, yeah.

Thomas Deleval: 24:15

Yeah, exactly.

Olivier Colson: 24:16

Okay. Uh, other things with barcodes.

Thomas Deleval: 24:19

Yeah, yeah, a lot of things, actually. Now you can enter a barcode manually when you have a damaged barcode. Like it often happens at the supermarket when the cashier has to type the barcode. No, you can do that in the barcode app as well. Uh, no. There is a sound played when you do something wrong. Like for instance, you scan a product that is not recognized. In the past, people didn't see there was an error, and they saw they were scanning stuff but didn't. Actually, it was creating a lot of issues, I guess.

Olivier Colson: 24:54

Well, we got feedback on that. And so that's why that was so interesting. Example of feedback getting implemented later. Okay. Yeah.

Thomas Deleval: 25:02

Uh, yeah. And we, we are improving the, um, the inventory adjustment. But in the past when you were scanning a location, there was nothing that was displayed. You had to scan a product, and then it says, okay, you are supposed to have ten products in this location. Do you confirm you have ten? Or then you can change. Um, now when you scan a location, it shows everything that is in this location. So, uh, you can see also if you say, uh, if it says three different products and you see only two, then you know there is something wrong.

Olivier Colson: 25:38

You have a more global view straight away. And so it.

Thomas Deleval: 25:40

Can because you cannot scan something that you don't have. So that's, uh.

Olivier Colson: 25:44

Sure. Okay. So we are reaching the end of the episode, so I suggest we, we go really quickly on the last point, but I think we saved the most important thing. So maybe a few words on new connectors that got implemented. Yes.

Thomas Deleval: 25:56

Yes. We introduced SendCloud in V 16. SendCloud is an aggregator covering a lot of different shippers in Europe. And now you can use the, um, the different, um, collect points so you can deliver to collect points using Saint Cloud. Uh, we also improved the setup of it because it was kind of, uh, difficult with some carriers with a very large, uh, spectrum of weight ranges. So you had to have one shipping method per weight range. And when it's one each, every 500g, it's very, uh, not very useful. So, um, uh, we are also, uh, upgrading the UPS connector. So that's for, uh, and we are also adding in India. Uh shiprocket. Which is also an aggregator, but specialized for India.

Olivier Colson: 26:55

So new stuff coming. Yeah. Yeah.

Thomas Deleval: 26:57

And for purchase, uh, which is my last app. Um, we are introducing purchase discounts like in, like in sales, actually, if you prefer to work with a net price or gross price. It's your call. So you can define your discounts there. We are also introducing so you will see that in 17, the sales have introduced what they call the product catalog. So when you sell, you have a nice wizard with all the products in a Kanban view where you can select the quantity that you want all in one go. So you can add several products at 1 in 1 go. The same will happen in purchase. So you will open the catalog of the vendor. So if you purchase for vendor A, you will see all the products from vendor A, of course. So if you need something. So currently you can select everything, but if you go to the catalog you are not normally you shouldn't make any errors. Um, and also introducing a default buyer for, for the vendor. So when a purchase order is created automatically for, for instance from a rule or from the replenishment report, it can it's assigned automatically to one purchaser.

Olivier Colson: 28:20

So some responsible person within your company that will like that.

Thomas Deleval: 28:24

Is the contact for these vendors.

Olivier Colson: 28:26

So in case there's an issue, he's aware about it. And so that's cool.

Thomas Deleval: 28:29

Not not much features to add in in purchase but it's already nice.

Olivier Colson: 28:34

I think the you know it's not because you don't add much that what you add is not important. That's Oh of course, and that will be the final word for today. So thank you very much for all your answers and for the glimpse you gave us to Odoo 17. And I hope people found it interesting because there are plenty of things coming and, well, see you soon.

Thomas Deleval: 28:56

See you soon. Bye.

Olivier Colson: 28:59

And that brings us to the to the end. And that brings us to the end of another episode. I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek of Odoo 17, and that it left you craving for more. If you're eager to explore further the exciting offerings at Odoo 17, mark your calendars for our grand in-house event Odoo experience taking place next November. And if you're in the mood for more captivating content, I highly recommend checking out our episode featuring Iso Hemp. Until next time, Cheers.