How a Bandung Manufacturer Cut Production Delays Using Odoo MRP

A furniture manufacturer in Bandung — wooden home furniture, selling to retailers and a growing export channel, around fifty staff — kept missing delivery dates. Not by days; by weeks. Customers were frustrated, the export channel was at risk, and the owner could not pinpoint why production was so unreliable when the workshop was clearly busy.

Where the delays came from

The root cause turned out to be materials, not labour. Production was planned in a spreadsheet, and material needs were worked out roughly, often after a job had started. A run of dining sets would begin, and partway through, the team would discover they were short on a particular hardware item or a specific wood. Production would stall while the material was ordered and waited for — and because supplier lead times were not factored in anywhere, the wait was always longer than hoped.

Meanwhile, nobody had a clear view of where each job was on the floor. A batch might be sitting half-finished at the sanding stage while everyone assumed it was nearly done. And the true cost of each product was a guess, which meant the export pricing was based on hope rather than numbers.

What changed

They implemented Odoo Manufacturing, with the hard work going into data and process.

Accurate BOMs first. Every product got a real bill of materials — every component, correct quantities, realistic waste allowance. This was the bulk of the project and the foundation for everything else. For the first time, the system knew exactly what each job consumed.

Material planning ahead of production. With BOMs in place and supplier lead times configured, Odoo could see component needs across planned production and trigger purchases in time. The “start the job, then discover the shortage” pattern stopped, because shortages were now visible before the job began.

Work-order tracking. Production was broken into operations — cut, assemble, sand, finish, pack — each at its work center. The owner could finally see where every batch was in real time, instead of assuming.

Real costing. Component costs and operation time rolled into an honest unit cost. The export pricing got rebuilt on actual numbers.

The result

Production delays dropped sharply within a couple of production cycles. The single biggest factor was eliminating mid-job material shortages — when jobs start with everything on hand, they run to schedule. Delivery dates became reliable, which steadied the export relationship that had been at risk.

The costing was the quieter, longer-term win. Knowing the true cost of each product meant the owner could price the export channel with confidence and spot which products were actually profitable versus which had been quietly losing money.

Why it worked

The temptation in a delay crisis is to push the floor to work faster. But the floor was not slow; it was starved of materials at the wrong moments and flying blind on job status. Fixing the planning — materials ready before jobs start, visible progress, real costs — addressed the actual cause.

It also worked because they invested in the data. Accurate BOMs are unglamorous and time-consuming to build, and they were the difference between an MRP system that planned correctly and one that would have produced confident-but-wrong numbers. The team resisted the urge to rush that part, and it paid off.

If your production keeps slipping and you suspect materials and visibility rather than effort, that is exactly what MRP is built to fix. We are happy to take an honest look at where your production is losing time, in a free one-hour conversation.