Good day all,

We have been using for over 2 years now and are pleased with the software, but we have been struggling with the barcodes. The reason for this is that we manufacture products ourselves and there are multiple steps to manufacture them. We would like to know if there are other companies who struggle with the same challenges as we do.

What we do
We manufacture product A. Product A is made of a few components:
- Semi-finished product
- Product box
- Leaflet

But the semi-finished product is also manufactured in-house and consists of these components:
- Raw materials
- Bottle
- Label
- Cap & pipette

Our sales process
We are a manufacturer that sells to wholesalers. We sell our products per unit, although most products are packed in boxes containing 144 pieces.

Our manufacturing process
We first start by manufacturing the semi-finished products, this is done per batch, let's say 10.000 products per batch. After that, these semi-finished product will be put in our warehouse for make-to-order sales OR will go directly to our packaging department, where they will add a product box and leaflet (semi-finished product + leaflet + product box > finished product).

At this point we already have 2 problems:
- After the filling of the semi-finished products there are 2 routes:
1. The semi-finished products are stored in the warehouse and are used for make-to-order sales
2. The semi-finished products are used to manufacture finished products

But how do we label these semi-finished products? In Odoo we finished a Manufacturing Order for semi-finished products and got 10.000 labels for every seperate product, this is not desirable, since we do not have space on the product to put labels on there, nor the manpower to label them all by hand. The problem is also that these batches are almost never the same, sometimes we get 9.000 semi-finished products, but also 10.100 for example, depending on the loss of materials.

One possible solution we have is to make a new Bill of Material where we put the semi-finished products on a pallet and use that, but maybe there is another solution?

That is problem 1.. Problem 2 is the packing of products.
When we have the semi-finished products, we need to package them. In the process, we add a product box and a leaflet. We then bundle the products per 12 together with a rubber band (there are exceptions though, in make-to-order situations). After processing all semi-finished products to finished products, we wrap the bundles in plastic and they are put in a box. A box can hold 144 products. Sometimes we have mixed boxes with multiple batch numbers. The products are then stored in the warehouse.

I guess what we need to do here is put the products in boxes and store these in the warehouse?

But sometimes we have make-to-order sales, where we only make a few products for a specific customer. We don't wrap the products in plastic then, but we fill a box (that can hold up to 144 pieces) with multiple products.

How can we solve this? We can't put Odoo labels on the products boxes themselves.

If there is someone who has experience with implementing barcodes with manufacturers and wants to be our advisor, we would greatly appreciate it. I think other business could also profit from a healthy discussion about this.

Version: Odoo 15.0+e (Enterprise Edition)