Odoo 20 plans manufacturing orders in list order. Sort by Deadline before you press Plan.

What changed in Odoo 20

Odoo's release notes for version 20, under Manufacturing:

"Manufacturing orders are now planned as soon as possible by default. When multiple orders are planned, their sequence in the list determines scheduling priority."

The same notes add two related changes:

• Backorder planning: "Backorders of planned productions are now also planned automatically upon their creation."
• Continuous production: "If 'Continuous Production' is enabled on the bill of materials, subsequent operations start as soon as some quantities are ready."

Source: Odoo 20 release notes, Manufacturing section.

We checked the first sentence in a browser. When you select orders and press Plan, Odoo sends their ids to the server in exactly the order the list shows, and plans them in that order. The first order gets the first free slot on every work centre it needs. The next gets what is left, and so on down the list. An urgent order near the bottom waits behind everything above it.

We tested Community only. We did not run 19.0, so this page says nothing about how 19 behaved, and we did not test Enterprise's planning views.

Why the default list can bury urgent work

The Manufacturing Orders list opens on the "To Do" filter with no column sorted. Its order is starred orders first, then by Start, oldest first. The Deadline column is hidden by default.

That works when orders arrive in roughly the order they're due. It goes wrong when they don't: a rush order taken today, a reorder with a short promise date or a sales order with a tight delivery all land below older orders that have weeks of slack.

In our test, orders were entered over two weeks with deadlines unrelated to entry order. That is the case above, and it is where the gap appears. If your orders really do arrive in deadline order, expect a smaller difference.

The fix: sort by Deadline, then Plan

1. Open Manufacturing. It starts on Operations → Manufacturing Orders, in the list view.

2. Click the column toggle at the right end of the header row and tick Deadline.

   

3. Click the Deadline header once, so the earliest deadline is at the top.

4. Tick the header checkbox to select every row on the page, then press Plan.

If you have more orders than one page, don't use "Select all". The list shows 80 rows a page. When you tick the header checkbox on a longer list, Odoo offers Select all for the rest. That option plans in Odoo's default order, even though the screen still shows your Deadline sort. With our 72 orders spread over two pages, it gave the same 20 late orders as the unsorted list. Put every order on one page instead: click the page counter at the top right (it reads 1-80), type a range that covers all your orders, such as 1-500, and press Enter. Then tick the header checkbox and press Plan. Don't plan page by page either. After each Plan, orders with the same deadline can change places, and in our test one order was never selected.

If some orders are already planned, Plan leaves them where they are and fits the rest around them. In our test, with half the orders planned earlier from the default list, the Deadline sort still left 20 orders late. To put the whole list in deadline order, first unplan the work orders that haven't started (step 1 under "When a job runs long"), then sort and Plan.

70 of our 72 orders shared a deadline with another order. Breaking those ties either way still left 0 late, so you don't need a second sort key.

If you use stars: sorting by Deadline replaces "starred first". Plan the starred orders first from the default list, then sort by Deadline and plan the rest the same way as step 4. In our test, the second Plan left the starred orders' work orders exactly where the first one put them (0 of 22 moved).

Check for late orders after you plan

Any of these shows the orders that will finish after their deadline. In our test, all three showed the same 20 orders after a Plan from the default list:

• the Late filter in the search bar,
• the Delayed Productions filter,
• a red date in the Deadline column.

Also check for work booked in the past. For 7 orders whose first operation was already finished on the previous Friday, Plan booked the next operation straight after it, before "now", instead of moving it forward. After you plan, look at the Start dates of the work orders you just planned. One in the past is booked into time that has already gone. Plan won't move it, and re-planning keeps it. Treat that order as later than shown, or set the Start of that work order and the ones after it by hand.

When a job runs long

We made one operation run 4 working hours over its planned time and recorded it the way the work order form saves it. Odoo moved nothing on its own. The order's next operation stayed booked to start before the long one ended. Community 20.0 shows no Replan button.

To re-plan:

1. Go to Operations → Work Orders. The list opens with the To Do, Blocked and In Progress filters on. Untick In Progress in the filter menu and keep the other two, so the list shows only work orders that haven't started. Tick the header checkbox, then Select all, then choose Actions → Unplan. (Select all is fine here, because the order you unplan in doesn't matter.)

2. Go back to Manufacturing Orders, sort by Deadline again and press Plan as in step 4 of the fix.

Keep In Progress out. If you unplan a work order that has started, the next Plan leaves its order unscheduled. In our test, 3 running orders were left with no dates, other work was booked on their machines, and the Late filter couldn't show them.

The list order matters again at this point. Re-planned from the default list, our shop still had 20 orders late. Re-planned from the Deadline-sorted list, it had 0.

Rerun it yourself

The dataset, the loader, the two Plan calls and an independent schedule checker are public: github.com/CyberNative-AI/.github, notes/odoo-20-plan-list-order. ./rerun.sh builds one container from the official Odoo image (pinned by digest), runs it with no network, plans the 72 orders both ways and prints the late count for each. The slip test above came from the same run but is not part of the rerun kit.

Test details: 72 manufacturing orders, 347 work orders and 10 work centres, with one paint booth as the bottleneck. In the main test all 72 orders fit on one page; the Select all, page-by-page and part-planned checks used the same shop. Routings have 3 to 6 operations. Deadlines fall 1 to 15 working days out. 4 orders are starred. Calendars run Monday to Friday, with a two-shift CNC router and a Thanksgiving closure. Some names and the 40-hour calendar come from Odoo's LGPL-3 Manufacturing demo data. Odoo's clock was frozen at Monday, November 2, 2026, 08:00 UTC, because Plan schedules from "now". Image: official Docker Hub odoo, sha256:61e3c71b0503c5f658e604c3e340bede20b97d05f726179fa006eae50a32fd23, Odoo Server 20.0-20261015. Plan's code is identical on the 20.0 branch as of October 28, 2026. Some calendar code differs there, and we did not rerun on it. "Late" means the planned finish is after the deadline. Nothing was produced.