The phone rings. It’s a customer whose plant is running a machine your company built and shipped five years back. They have a maintenance issue, or need a part, or want to know if it’s still under warranty. Whatever the problem is, answering it well depends on equipment history and warranty traceability, information that’s supposed to be at your fingertips. Is it?
You hesitate and tell them, “Let me check on that and call you back.” You try to buy time while you hunt down old specs from a filing cabinet or track down the engineer who built it, hoping he still works there. This dithering means the call has already gone sideways. The customer loses faith in your business and your brand, and it may hurt your bottom line.
A Simple Test of Your Service Operation
Try this right now: time how long it takes to quote a spare part for a machine you built ten years ago.
If you have to dig through old drawings, walk the shop floor asking around, or wait on the one person who happens to remember, your installed base management amounts to institutional memory. And that’s an expensive way to run the most profitable part of your business.
According to Deloitte, aftermarket margins in industrial manufacturing run roughly 2.5 times new equipment margins. (Source: Deloitte)
Similarly, a McKinsey analysis across 30 industries put average aftermarket EBIT margin at 25% versus 10% for new equipment. Service is good business, but only if you have the information to run it well. (Source: McKinsey)
Two Systems That Don’t Talk
To capitalize on your service business, you might try getting organized. Maybe you roll out better folders, a shared drive, and a naming convention everyone actually follows this time. None of it works, because the record of what got built and the record of what happens to it afterward still live in two different places.
During the build, your shop finalizes a bill of materials, assigns serial numbers, and closes the manufacturing order. You ship the machine to its new owner. From that point on, the repairs, the parts swapped, and the changes made in the field get recorded somewhere else, if they get recorded at all. A spreadsheet doesn’t fix this, since somebody still has to know it exists and update it by hand for every machine at every customer site.
Meanwhile, during a service call, the technician standing in front of the machine is forced to work off memory. He knows it looks like others he’s fixed before, but he can’t confirm the bearing size or the motor spec without calling the shop. The information exists somewhere in the building. He just has no way to reach it from where he’s standing.
Set Up Your Service Business for Success
Odoo brings manufacturing, inventory, sales, and service into one ERP platform, organized into separate apps for each part of the business. The Manufacturing app records the manufacturing order, the BOM, shipping details, and the customer, all tied to a serial number the moment the build is complete.
Scheduling and dispatch for technicians runs through the Planning app (Field Service in versions before 19.2). It manages the service task from the initial customer call through the on-site job. This is the moment equipment history and warranty traceability for field service manufacturers get tested.
When a machine needs service, a customer call creates a service task and dispatches a technician. But with standard Odoo, the task doesn’t automatically include the serial number of the equipment being serviced. The technician has the job details, while the machine’s build history stays in the Manufacturing app, with no link between the two.
During implementation, Novobi connects those records by adding a field for the equipment’s serial number to the service task. That field links the technician’s job to the machine’s existing manufacturing record in Odoo, giving the service team a direct path to its original build history.
With that connection in place, Odoo effectively works as installed base management software. A technician at any location can pull up the machine’s full history in seconds, including how it was built, which components went into it, where it was shipped, and what service it has received. That context provides a clearer picture of the equipment before starting the job, making it easier to diagnose problems and understand previous repairs.
Generic field service management tools are strong at scheduling and dispatch, but because they sit outside the manufacturing system, technicians may struggle to piece together equipment history. Odoo and Novobi keep that history connected to the service task, so the technician can easily access the context behind the machine.
Your Install Base Is an Intelligence Network
Every machine your company has shipped is sitting somewhere with a known customer, configuration, and service history. That installed base gives you a view into what’s happening across your customers long after the original sale. When you connect service data to the customer record, a service call can become a source of new business.
While on site, technicians may hear about new projects, plant expansions, or equipment needs before your sales force does. If the technician logs that comment as a note on the service task, tied to the customer and the equipment, a passing remark becomes an opportunity the sales team can actually see and pursue.
The result is an install base that does more than track where your machines are. It becomes a source of intelligence about what your customers are planning and where the next opportunities may come from.
What a good call looks like
A customer calls to ask whether a machine is still under warranty or whether a repair should be covered. You pull up the serial number. The build date is right there, along with the warranty terms and every service visit logged against it. You can tell the customer exactly what’s covered and back it up with the machine’s history. They hang up satisfied.
Warranty traceability links the build record to service tasks and puts that information in the hands of the people who need it, when they need it. A technician can see what was built, a service coordinator can see what has already been done, and the business can maintain a complete history of the equipment it has sold.
That’s the value of connecting manufacturing and field service in Odoo. Instead of treating each service call as a separate transaction, you create a continuous record around the equipment and the customer.
Ready to build a more connected service operation in Odoo? Let’s start a conversation.
DISCLAIMER: The information in this article reflects the views and opinions of Novobi, based on publicly available information, and is intended for informational purposes only. It is not legal or financial advice. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
