The Pre-Go-Live Checklist for an Odoo Implementation in Manufacturing

Use this checklist in the final four to six weeks before your Odoo MRP go-live. It covers the configuration, data, process, and people items that most commonly cause a delayed launch or a rocky first week of production. Work through it with your implementation partner, section by section, and don't mark anything complete until you've tested it in your staging environment with real data.

The checklist assumes you've already completed your core build: BOMs are drafted, work centers exist, and your chart of accounts is live. This is your last-mile verification, not a build guide.

1. Master Data Integrity

Bad master data is the most common reason an Odoo MRP go-live stumbles. Configuration can be fixed in hours; corrupted or missing production data can stall your shop floor for days.

1. Verify all Bills of Materials are complete and active. Open each BOM in Odoo's Manufacturing module and confirm component quantities, units of measure, and BOM type (manufactured, kit, or subcontracting). Spot-check at least 20% of your highest-volume products by exploding the BOM and comparing the component list against your legacy system or engineering documentation.
2. Confirm multi-level BOM nesting is correct. For any product with a subassembly, trace the full explosion in Odoo to verify that phantom BOMs and semi-finished goods are structured the way your planners expect. A missing level here won't show up until you try to schedule a manufacturing order.
3. Audit units of measure across components and purchase orders. Mismatched UoMs (for example, purchasing in kilograms but consuming in grams) will silently generate incorrect demand signals. Run Odoo's UoM consistency check and resolve any mismatches before go-live.
4. Validate routing operations and work center assignments. For every product with a routing, confirm that each operation is assigned to the correct work center, that the duration is set in the right unit (minutes, not hours), and that the work center has a defined capacity and operating schedule. Missing capacity data makes Odoo's scheduling output unreliable from day one.
5. Check product costing methods are set correctly. Decide now whether each product category uses standard cost, average cost (AVCO), or FIFO, and verify those settings in Odoo's product category configuration. Changing a costing method after transactions exist creates accounting revaluation entries that take time to reconcile.
6. Import and reconcile opening inventory balances. Use an inventory adjustment in Odoo to load your opening stock. Cross-reference the totals by product category against your outgoing system. Inventory value differences on day one will propagate into your cost of goods sold and financial reports for weeks.

2. Manufacturing Configuration

These settings control how Odoo generates, schedules, and closes manufacturing orders. Getting them right before go-live saves you from having to retroactively fix a backlog of incorrectly structured orders.

1. Set manufacturing lead times and security lead times at the product level. Odoo's MRP scheduler uses these to calculate planned dates. If they're left at zero, every replenishment will show "due today" and your planners will lose trust in the system within the first week.
2. Configure reordering rules and min/max quantities for MTO vs. MTS products. Separate your make-to-stock products (driven by reorder points) from make-to-order products (driven by sales order demand) and verify that the routes on each product match your intended policy. A product on the wrong route will either build unnecessary stock or fail to trigger a manufacturing order at all.
3. Test the MRP scheduler run end-to-end in staging. Load a representative set of open sales orders or forecasted demand into your staging environment and run the scheduler. Review the proposed manufacturing orders and purchase orders for quantity, date, and component accuracy. Your implementation partner should walk through this with your planning team before you run it live.
4. Confirm work order creation is enabled if you're using the Shop Floor module. In Manufacturing settings, verify that "Work Orders" is activated. Without it, Odoo generates manufacturing orders but not the individual work order steps operators need to report time and progress against each routing operation.
5. Review scrap and byproduct configurations. If any of your processes generate scrap or secondary outputs, confirm that byproducts are defined on the relevant BOMs and that scrap reasons are set up in the system. This affects both inventory accuracy and cost variance reporting.

3. Quality and Traceability

Traceability is the one area where a gap discovered after go-live is genuinely difficult to backfill. Lot and serial number history only exists from the moment you start recording it.

1. Enable lot or serial number tracking on every product that requires it. In each product's configuration, set the tracking field to "By Lot" or "By Serial Number" as appropriate. Verify this is consistent with your customer contracts, warranty commitments, and any regulatory requirements. Products that ship to customers without the expected traceability data create chargebacks and compliance issues.
2. Set up quality control points on critical operations. In Odoo's Quality module, define quality control points on the manufacturing operations where inspection is required. Assign the correct quality team, set the frequency (all, periodically, or statistically), and confirm the checks are associated with the right product categories or products.
3. Create quality alert workflows and assign responsible users. Decide who receives notification when a quality check fails and who is authorized to close an alert. Test the workflow by triggering a failure in staging and tracing the notification and escalation path to completion.
4. Verify that traceability reports return correct data after a test production run. Run at least one complete manufacturing order in staging, from component consumption through finished goods receipt. Then pull the lot traceability report and confirm the upstream and downstream links are fully visible. This is your proof that traceability is actually working, not just configured.

4. Accounting and Costing Integration

Odoo's strength is that manufacturing, inventory, and accounting share one database. But that integration only pays off if the accounting configuration is tested before transactions start flowing at volume.

1. Confirm stock valuation accounts are mapped to the correct journal entries. In Odoo Accounting, verify the stock input, stock output, and stock valuation accounts for each product category. Run a test purchase receipt and manufacturing order in staging, then check that the resulting journal entries match your accountant's expectations.
2. Test work-in-progress (WIP) accounting if you're using standard costing. Standard cost environments generate WIP entries when manufacturing orders are opened and variance entries when they're closed. Create and close a test manufacturing order in staging, then review the journal entries with your controller to confirm the WIP and variance accounts are correct.
3. Reconcile landed cost configuration for purchased components. If you're using Odoo's landed costs feature to allocate freight or duties to component value, test a full cycle: vendor bill, landed cost allocation, and the resulting inventory valuation update. Errors here affect product margin reporting from the first day of operation.
4. Close out any open periods in your legacy system before the cutover date. Agree with your controller on a hard cutover date and close the prior period in your old system before go-live. Running parallel books across two systems for more than a week creates reconciliation work that compounds daily.

5. User Readiness and Access Controls

1. Assign user roles and access rights by function, then test them. In Odoo, manufacturing users, quality managers, inventory operators, and accountants all need different permission levels. Log into staging as a representative user from each group and confirm they can do their job and cannot access what they shouldn't. Role-based access gaps discovered on go-live day cause delays and security incidents.
2. Run at least one end-to-end process walkthrough with each user group. Don't limit training to slide decks. Have your shop floor operators enter actual work orders in staging; have your planners run the MRP scheduler; have your warehouse team pick components and report consumption. Users who've touched the real workflow before go-live recover from mistakes faster on day one.
3. Document the five most common daily tasks for each role as a quick-reference guide. Your implementation partner can help produce these. A one-page reference for "how to confirm a manufacturing order and report scrap" reduces support calls in the first two weeks by a meaningful margin.
4. Identify a go-live support contact for each shift during the first week. Whether that's your internal super-user or a named contact at your implementation partner, every person on the shop floor should know who to call when something unexpected happens. The first week of a live system always surfaces edge cases that staging didn't expose.

6. Final Go/No-Go Gate

Run this gate with your implementation partner and your internal project lead no later than five business days before go-live. If any item below is unresolved, that's a conversation about whether to proceed on schedule.

1. All staging test scenarios have passed with production-representative data. This means real product names, real quantities, real suppliers. Test data built from placeholder products doesn't expose the edge cases that cause go-live failures.
2. Opening balances are loaded and reconciled in the production environment. Don't migrate opening data on go-live morning. Load it at least 48 hours early and give your operations and finance leads time to review and sign off.
3. All users have logged into the production environment and confirmed access. A user who can't log in on go-live day is a preventable problem. Send credentials at least one week early and require confirmation.
4. A rollback plan is documented and agreed upon. Define the trigger: if X type of failure occurs within Y hours, you revert to the legacy system for Z additional days. Having this decision documented in advance removes panic from the equation if something does go wrong.
5. Your implementation partner has a named resource available for live support on go-live day. Not on-call, not reachable by email. Available. The first day of live production is the highest-risk day of the project, and having your partner reachable in real time is the single highest-value thing you can arrange.

After Go-Live: The First 30 Days

The checklist above gets you to a clean launch. What keeps it clean is what happens in the first month. Plan a daily stand-up for the first two weeks between your internal project lead and your implementation partner to surface issues before they compound. Track open items in a shared log, not in someone's inbox.

One of the advantages of Odoo's integrated architecture is that problems in manufacturing surface quickly in connected modules: a missed component consumption shows up in inventory valuation; a closed manufacturing order that wasn't costed correctly shows up in your cost of goods sold before the end of the month. That visibility cuts both ways. It makes errors faster to find, which means they're also faster to fix, as long as someone is watching.

Schedule a formal post-go-live review at the 30-day mark. By then, your team has real production data to work with, and your implementation partner can identify which configurations need tuning based on actual usage rather than assumptions. Most of the adjustments made at day 30 cost a fraction of what they'd cost if left until year two.