How to Automate Odyssey ERP
Odyssey ERP runs a metalcasting plant end to end: Shop, Heat and Flask Planners for scheduling, pattern and die management that counts impressions and raises tool orders, scrap control, heat analysis and lot tracking, and metal certifications. Published metal indexes and customer supplier portals sit outside it, which is where an agent such as WebRun looks.
Written by
Yara Haddad
Data operations
Reviewed by
Julian Adeniyi
Retail operations
Every casting traces back to the heat it was poured from
Odyssey ERP comes from B&L Information Systems in Bridgman, Michigan, a company that has done nothing but metalcasting software since 1976, and it runs foundries, die casters and investment casters. Everybody just says Odyssey.
A foundry is an unusual business to put on software, because the unit of work keeps changing shape. There is a pattern or a die, a capital asset with a life measured in impressions. There is a heat of metal, with a chemistry that either meets the spec or does not, and every casting poured from it inherits that record. There is a mould, a pour, a shakeout, a grind and a machining operation, and a scrap rate that quietly decides whether the job made money.
Odyssey holds all of that in one place: the tooling, the heat, the schedule, the cost and the certificate. Which is why the plant runs on it, and why the quality manager and the controller are looking at the same screen.
The surcharge is decided by a number you do not publish
Start with the metal. A surcharge is written into most contracts against a published index, so every month somebody opens that page, reads a number, works out which contracts it applies to and writes the notices. Read it late and you eat the difference on everything poured in between.
The rest of the week has the same shape. A foundry selling into automotive, agriculture or heavy truck lives inside customer supplier portals: releases that change quantity without a phone call, rolling forecasts, quality scorecards, corrective action requests with a clock running on them, and labelling requirements that differ by receiving plant.
Alongside those sit alloy, sand, resin and refractory suppliers with their own logins, acknowledgements and ship dates. None of it arrives on its own. All of it has to be fetched, by somebody, before the day starts.
Odyssey plans the pour from what the floor reported
Inside the plant boundary Odyssey is thorough, and much of this is already sitting there unused.
Scheduling runs through planners built for the process rather than generic work centers: a Shop Planner, a Heat Planner and a Flask Planner, with drag and drop. Pattern and die management counts impressions automatically off production reporting and raises a tool order when a pattern reaches its review limit, which plants otherwise keep on a whiteboard. On the quality side there is scrap control, heat analysis and lot tracking, returns and hold tracking, corrective action reporting and metal certifications, so the cert going out with a shipment is built from the heat record rather than retyped. Purchasing has a supplier portal, sales covers quoting, forecasting, EDI and surcharges, and reporting runs through dashboards, intelligent views and Crystal Reports.
Every one of those calculates from what was reported into Odyssey. Impressions counted on the floor, scrap booked at the grinder, a heat logged at the furnace. The index that sets the surcharge, the release a customer revised on Tuesday and the scorecard that just dropped a grade are all real, all decisive, and all somewhere else.
A revised release can reach the sand before it is mixed
The plan for the week is only as good as the demand behind it, and the demand is published somewhere you already have a login for.
Customer portals read every morning for revised releases, updated forecasts, new corrective action requests and scorecard changes, each one set against the part numbers and the pour schedule it affects. A release that halved is worth knowing before the moulding line is set.
The published index behind the surcharge read on the day it moves, with the affected contracts listed and the notices drafted. Alloy, sand and refractory suppliers checked for acknowledged ship dates, so a delayed load of ferroalloy becomes a schedule change rather than a furnace standing idle.
Certificate packages assembled per shipment from chemistry and physicals already recorded, and put where the customer's quality portal wants them. Freight tracked to the receiving dock, because a late casting on an assembly line starts a phone call that goes badly.
The metallurgy is in Odyssey. This is everything the metallurgy is being sold into.
The plant would rather have that hour back
All of that is one person, a browser and a list, finished before the first shift meeting. It is usually the person you would rather had spent the hour on the scrap rate.
WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the customer portal, the index page or the supplier site, reads what is there, and either writes it against the Odyssey order or gives you the morning list.
Nothing has to be integrated first, which matters when a customer's portal is a decade old and shared with every supplier they have. It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, you can watch a run and stop it, and anything reaching a customer is drafted and waits for a person.
The workflows below are already built, and each names what it opens.
Questions people ask
Our metal surcharge is tied to a published index. Can it read that?
Yes, provided you can see it in a browser with the access you already have. It opens the page your formula names, reads the figure, and lists the customers and part numbers affected, so the notice you send is calculated rather than remembered.
Will it send surcharge notices or certificates to customers by itself?
No. Anything reaching a customer is drafted and held for a person. A wrong surcharge letter or a wrong certificate is a claim rather than a typo, so the writing is automated and the sending stays with you.
Is it safe to let something outside Odyssey write into it?
You choose. Many plants start with it reading only and producing a morning list, then allow specific fields once they have watched a few runs. It uses your own login, so it can never reach anything you could not reach yourself.
12 ready-made Odyssey ERP workflows
Each one names the apps it touches and the exact steps it takes. Open one to read what it will do, then turn it on.
Want one of these running on your own Odyssey ERP?
Show WebRun the process once and it will run it on schedule, in your own private browser environment.