EDGEBIC + Odoo Integration FAQ: 12 Questions Plants Ask First

These are the questions Odoo plants ask in the first conversation, answered without hedging: there is no certified app, the interface is your existing exports, nothing is installed inside Odoo, and nothing you import can disturb an order already running. Each answer stands on its own, so skip to whichever one you came for.

EDGEBIC by User Solutions is a finite capacity scheduling platform that sits beside your ERP. The full walkthrough is the complete Odoo integration guide, and the field-level detail lives in the Odoo to EDGEBIC mapping reference.

Is there a certified Odoo app or connector?

No, and it is a design decision rather than a gap. EDGEBIC integrates through reusable import masks that read Excel, CSV, delimited text, or a database source. You map your export's columns onto EDGEBIC's fields once and save the mask; every run after that is two clicks. The same architecture serves Odoo, SAP, QuickBooks, and home-grown systems identically, so there is no per-ERP app to certify, version-match, or repair when either side upgrades. An app is a dependency. A file is not.

Odoo has its own scheduling. Why add EDGEBIC?

Odoo plans work orders against a work center calendar, which is useful, but it does not sequence every open order against real machine counts, sequence-dependent changeover, and operator skills at once. EDGEBIC does exactly that. It takes the products, work centers, operations, and orders Odoo already holds and builds a finite capacity schedule, then hands the dates back. The general distinction is in finite versus infinite capacity scheduling, and the wider product comparison is on the RMDB versus Odoo page.

Does EDGEBIC replace any part of Odoo?

No. Odoo stays the system of record for products, bills of material, purchasing, inventory, and accounting. EDGEBIC reads exports, builds a finite capacity schedule against real shift hours and real machine counts, and hands dates and dispatch lists back as Excel. Order entry and material planning keep running exactly as they do today. The general case for that split is in why ERP needs a scheduling add-on.

Does anything get installed inside Odoo?

No. No module is added, no schema is extended, and no interface object joins your upgrade path. The only artifacts on the Odoo side are the exports your team builds, which are ordinary list exports run by people who already have access to run them.

What exactly has to come out of Odoo?

Four exports carry a complete scheduling model, and a fifth is optional. Products (an identifier is the only mandatory column). Work centers (an identifier, plus capacity detail). Operations (end product, step name, an operation flag, and hours per unit). Open manufacturing orders (product, quantity, and a date). Optionally, work order time logs (job number, work center, date, and hours or pieces). Any Odoo list export to XLSX or CSV is a valid source.

How long until the first real schedule?

Most plants see a first finite capacity schedule from their own data in the first working session, and a tuned one inside two weeks. The documented benchmark in the User Solutions lineage is the Plastilite integration: 5 days, Monday to Friday, from first export to a complete optimized schedule with dates synchronized back to the ERP. An Odoo estate with clean operations data often moves at that pace, because all four exports come out of the manufacturing module natively.

Do we have to clean our operations data first?

No, and trying usually costs a month. Import what Odoo holds today, schedule it, and compare the dates with what your planner believes. The disagreements are your defect list and they arrive specific: a wrong hours-per-unit shows up as an order finishing implausibly early, a missing setup time shows up as a machine that appears to change over for free. Because a routing re-import wipes and recreates that product's steps, each corrected file replaces the last cleanly.

What happens when Odoo is upgraded?

Nothing, in almost every case. The integration reads files rather than calling an app, so there is no connector version to track and nothing to re-certify. If an upgrade renames a column heading in an export, you re-map that column in the mask once, which takes minutes.

Our operation times are per batch. Do we rebuild them?

No. Put a conversion factor on the hours column in the operations mask: 0.01 turns a per-100-piece time into per piece, and 0.016667 turns minutes into hours, combined if the export mixes both. A cell of 250 minutes per 100 pieces then lands as the right per-unit value. The factors are saved with the mask, which makes the conversion permanent and auditable through the per-run log.

Do imported orders schedule themselves?

No, and the separation is deliberate. An import changes data; the scheduler changes the plan. Newly imported manufacturing orders appear as unscheduled demand and stay there until you run the scheduler. Before the run starts, a confirmation states the scope in plain numbers: how many jobs are new and how many existing jobs are being rescheduled. An import can therefore never silently rearrange a plant. The modes are covered in EDGEBIC scheduling modes explained.

Can an import disturb orders already running?

No, for two independent reasons. Every scheduled job carries a frozen snapshot of the routing it was planned with, so a routing change affects future jobs and leaves work in progress alone. And recorded work is never moved by any run: an operation with an actual start and an actual end is historical fact. On top of both, imports never schedule anything.

What can import never bring across?

The settings that most change what a schedule looks like, because no Odoo export has a column for them. Work center groups (machine pools re-shopped on every reschedule, with per-member efficiency factors). The sequence-dependent setup matrix that lets the optimizer sequence work to cut changeover. Operator skills and rosters. Bottleneck anchoring. Lot streaming with transfer batches. Each is configured once inside EDGEBIC and then applies to every imported order afterwards. The EDGEBIC product overview maps them.

Who runs this day to day?

The planner, in about twenty minutes each morning, without IT. Involve IT exactly once, to turn the four Odoo exports into saved list exports that land in a known folder with stable names. After that the routine is export, run the saved masks, run the scheduler, publish the dispatch lists. For the same questions answered for other platforms, the QuickBooks and Syteline / CloudSuite Industrial FAQs follow the same shape.

Still deciding?

The fastest way to settle any of this is your own export. Pull this week's open manufacturing orders and an operations file, then bring them to a demo: mapping them live takes minutes, and you leave having watched your own plant scheduled against its own capacity.