1. Executive overview

Paint Factory Management turns Dolibarr into a genuine ERP and MES platform dedicated to the manufacturing of paints, varnishes, lacquers, wood stains and industrial coatings. It covers the entire industrial value chain of a coating plant, from raw material procurement and laboratory formulation through to production batches, colour matching, quality release, packaging, warehousing, customer shipment, regulatory safety documentation, waste treatment and full cost accounting.

The objective is explicit: a company operating a paint factory should be able to run its whole business inside Dolibarr, without any additional software. Every function that a paint manufacturer would otherwise buy as a separate formulation package, laboratory information system, production scheduler or quality module is provided natively here, and is fully connected to the standard Dolibarr modules the company already uses.

1.1 What makes this module different

·       Formulation-first design: recipes are versioned, weight-based, costed to the litre, and drive production directly.

·       True colour management: a shade catalogue (RAL, NCS, Pantone), CIELab L*a*b* measurement, Delta E tolerance and right-first-time tinting statistics.

·       A manufacturing flow that mirrors reality: weighing, dispersion, grinding, let-down, tinting, quality control, filling.

·       Regulatory readiness built in: CAS numbers, REACH registration numbers, hazard classes, CLP pictograms, H and P statements, safety data sheets, ADR transport classes and hazardous waste tracking forms.

·       A cockpit dashboard designed specifically for a paint plant, including a live paint-chip palette of the shades actually produced during the month.

·       Full cost transparency: material, packaging, labour, energy and overhead costs consolidated per batch, per product and per period.

2. Business objects covered

The module ships 22 interconnected business objects. Each one has a searchable and filterable list with a column selector, a full record card with creation, modification, validation, closing, cancellation and deletion, and automatic cross-references to every related record.

3. The Paint Factory cockpit

The dashboard deliberately departs from the classic Dolibarr layout. It is organised as an industrial cockpit built around the identity of a paint plant: a pigment gradient banner, a ten-band colour ribbon, a horizontal manufacturing flow rail instead of a generic kanban, and a live paint-chip palette that renders the actual shades produced during the current month as real colour swatches.

3.1 Zone 1 - Production and yield

·       Volume produced this month, today and this year, in litres.

·       Number of batches currently in progress.

·       Average material yield, colour-coded against the plant target.

·       Scrap rate.

·       Average cost price per litre across validated formulas.

·       Average VOC content of the formula portfolio, in grams per litre.

3.2 Zone 2 - Manufacturing flow rail

Ten columns, one per manufacturing stage (planned, weighing, dispersion, grinding, let-down, tinting, quality control, filling, completed, blocked). Each column carries its own colour, the number of batches at that stage and the corresponding volume in litres, so a supervisor sees instantly where the plant is congested.

3.3 Zone 3 - Palette of the month

A grid of paint chips rendered in the true hexadecimal colour of each shade actually manufactured during the month, ranked by volume, each showing the shade code, its commercial name and the litres produced. This is the signature visual element of the module and has no equivalent in a standard Dolibarr dashboard.

3.4 Zone 4 - Analytical charts

·       Twelve-month production volume (bar chart).

·       Volume breakdown by paint type (pie chart).

·       Cost price structure: material versus labour versus energy (pie chart).

·       Most produced paints (bar chart).

3.5 Zones 5 to 7 - Quality, supply and commercial

·       Quality: conformity rate with a graphical gauge, right-first-time tinting rate, average Delta E and open non-conformities.

·       Supply: stock value, materials below reorder point, late receipts, equipment availability, maintenance due and waste treated this month.

·       Commercial: revenue for the month, average margin rate and orders awaiting shipment.

4. Decisional reporting

A dedicated Reporting menu provides nine cross-functional situation reports. Every report can be exported to CSV, Excel and Word, or sent directly to the printer, and every export is encoding-safe so accented characters are never corrupted.

5. Permissions and security

Access is governed by nine functional permission groups. Read and write permissions are granted by default on activation so that the module is immediately usable, while deletion and administration permissions remain closed until explicitly granted.

A tenth permission grants administration of the module itself, including the configuration page and the demonstration dataset controls.

6. Integration with native Dolibarr modules

The module is not an isolated silo. Every record that carries a business partner or a product exposes a native integration bar giving one-click access to the corresponding standard Dolibarr features.

7. Configuration and demonstration data

The configuration page exposes the plant-level parameters and, importantly, the demonstration dataset controls requested for evaluation and training purposes.

7.1 Demonstration dataset

Two buttons are provided on the configuration page:

·       Install demo data - populates the module with a complete, coherent and realistic paint plant: suppliers and customers as native third parties, raw materials with genuine CAS numbers, a RAL, NCS and Pantone shade catalogue, versioned formulas with weight-based bills of materials, finished products in several packaging sizes, production batches spread over twelve months with manufacturing steps, tinting records, laboratory tests, non-conformities, equipment and maintenance, packaging, multi-zone stock, purchases, customer orders, deliveries, safety data sheets, waste collections, production staff and cost records.

·       Remove demo data - completely clears the demonstration dataset, including the native third parties it created and any records a user has attached to a demonstration parent, leaving the module empty and ready for production use.

The dataset is deliberately built so that every headline indicator is meaningful from the first screen: production is forced into the current day and current month, measured quality values are drawn inside their own tolerance bands with a realistic small rejection rate, and cost prices are derived from the actual bill of materials rather than being random.

8. Languages

The complete user interface, including every field label, menu entry, status, report header and help text, is delivered in five languages: French, English, Italian, German and Spanish. Each language file contains the full terminology set, and the module protects its own wording against interference from other installed modules so that labels always display the intended paint industry vocabulary.

9. Technical characteristics

·       22 dedicated database tables with multi-entity support and indexed foreign keys.

·       Automatic schema self-healing on upgrade: missing columns are added without manual intervention.

·       Demonstration dataset versioning so improved demo content is refreshed on module upgrade.

·       Column selector, per-column search and pagination on every list.

·       Consistent visual charter: pigment palette, gradient KPI cards, in-page tab bar, responsive grids.

·       Font Awesome 5 compatible iconography throughout.

·       Encoding-safe exports in CSV, Excel, Word and print for all reports.

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