Odoo 20 was unveiled at Odoo Experience 2026 in Brussels in September and is now available for new deployments. For existing clients, the upgrade tools are expected at the end of November - but the groundwork should start now, especially for manufacturers.
Odoo’s R&D team has focused heavily on manufacturing in this release, with 5 new features and 18 enhancements across the Manufacturing module alone. The changes range from a reshaped work order planning view to proper support for continuous production, and together they signal a shift in how Odoo expects manufacturers to use the platform day-to-day.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s new and what it means for your shop floor.
Continuous production support
One of the most significant additions is proper continuous production support. In previous versions of Odoo, manufacturing orders assumed a batch-based model - clear start, clear end, measured output. For process manufacturers (chemicals, food, paper, anything that runs 24/7), this was always a workaround, often requiring custom modules or spreadsheets to bridge the gap.
In Odoo 20, you can enable Continuous Production on a Bill of Materials, which lets the next operation start as soon as some units are ready, rather than waiting for the previous operation to complete. For a production floor that runs continuously, this is the first time the standard Odoo workflow actually matches reality.
The feature is off by default, so existing BoMs keep their current behaviour unless you turn it on. Worth testing on a single BoM first before rolling it out across the floor.
Draft versus confirmed manufacturing orders
A smaller but useful change is a new “Auto Confirm Production” setting on the Manufacturing operation type. When unticked, replenishment rules and Make to Order create draft manufacturing orders that a planner must manually confirm, rather than auto-confirming them straight away.
For businesses with a dedicated planner reviewing demand before committing to production, this adds a sensible checkpoint. The default behaviour matches Odoo 19 (auto-confirmed), so this is opt-in.
Reset MO to draft
Manufacturing managers can now reset cancelled manufacturing orders back to draft, and send completed ones back to “In Progress” if needed. Previously, correcting a mistaken MO cancellation or re-opening a done MO required workarounds or technical intervention. This gives floor managers more flexibility to handle real-world scenarios where things don’t go to plan.
Access is restricted to Manufacturing managers, so standard operators can’t accidentally reset anything.
New Work Order views
Perhaps the biggest usability change for daily users is a reworked set of planning views for work orders. There’s a new Kanban view with one column per work centre, which makes it easy to see what’s queued where at a glance. There’s a Gantt view grouped by work centre, which helps planners visualise capacity and bottlenecks. There’s an Employee Planning view that shows work orders per operator, useful for staff utilisation. And finished work orders now stay visible in the Gantt by default, giving you better retrospective visibility.
The Gantt also supports drag-and-drop re-planning with clearer colour coding, which makes rescheduling faster when priorities shift.
Put in Pack from MO
If you use the Packages feature in Odoo, you can now set a destination package on a finished product and have it applied automatically when the order is produced. The MO gets a Packages smart button, and the Barcode app includes a Put in Pack option. For businesses that ship finished goods in specific pack configurations, this removes a manual step.
Compare BoMs pivot
A new pivot view lets you compare bills of materials side by side, which is useful for process improvement work, cost analysis, or managing multiple variants of the same product. There’s also a new “Extra Cost per unit” field, giving you more granular cost tracking.
Vendor Quality Rate
Not strictly a Manufacturing feature, but closely related - the Purchase module now shows a Vendor Quality Rate on each supplier’s contact form. It opens a Quality Check Analysis filtered to that vendor and the last year, grouped by product.
For manufacturers managing supplier relationships, this is a useful at-a-glance view of which vendors are consistently delivering quality components and which are costing you quality time. Supplier conversations get easier when you can point to actual data.
Light Users: a potentially significant cost change
The new Light User tier at £7 per user per month is likely to be particularly relevant for manufacturers. If you have shop floor staff who only need access to the Shop Floor app, warehouse staff who only use Warehouse, or quality checkers who only need Quality - they can be moved to Light User instead of the £22 Standard tier.
For a manufacturing team with 20 shop floor operators and 10 warehouse staff, the saving could be substantial. However, there’s a catch to be aware of: active employee records in HR used in Planning, Shop Floor or Payslips count as Light Users even if those staff don’t log in. So before you upgrade, it’s worth auditing your HR data to understand how many employees will fall into the Light User count under the new agreement.
What this means for your upgrade planning
Taken together, Odoo 20 is a meaningful step forward for manufacturers. The Manufacturing module has been refined around how production actually runs, with continuous production support filling a long-standing gap and the new planning views making day-to-day management easier.
If you’re already on Odoo, we’d suggest reviewing your current BoMs to see where continuous production could simplify things, auditing your HR records before the Light User changes take effect, checking any custom modules against the technical changes in Odoo 20 (particularly around consumption fields and view inheritance), and planning your upgrade for after the Odoo upgrade tools are released at the end of November, giving yourself a few months to test everything properly.
If you’re new to Odoo and considering it for your manufacturing business, Odoo 20 is the version to look at - the Manufacturing module is more mature and better suited to a wider range of production models than it’s ever been.
How we can help
Sixo Systems is a UK Odoo Silver Partner based in Liverpool, working with manufacturing businesses across the country to get the most out of Odoo. Whether you’re planning an upgrade from an older version, considering Odoo for the first time, or trying to work out which of these new features would make the biggest difference to your floor, we’d be happy to talk it through.
Book a call or drop us a message to start the conversation.