Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Product Management.

Product Management in Dolibarr is the part of the system that controls your full product lifecycle. That means everything from the moment you define what a product is, all the way through to how it sits in your warehouse, how it gets manufactured, and how it moves out the door. If you work with physical goods or services in any structured way, this is the area of the system you will be living in most.

Let’s walk through what Product Management is actually made up of. There are seven sub-modules, and each one handles a distinct part of the product world.

The first is Products and Services, which is your master catalogue. Think of this as the source of truth for everything your business sells or uses. Every item, every service, every component — it lives here first.

The second is Stock and Warehouse Management. This gives you real-time visibility into your inventory. You can see what you have on hand, where it is physically located, and how stock levels are changing as things move in and out.

Third, you have Barcodes. This module handles both the generation and scanning of barcodes, which is useful when you need to speed up receiving, picking, or stocktaking processes.

Fourth is Batches, Lots, and Serials. This one is all about traceability. If you need to track which batch a product came from, when it was made, or which serial number belongs to which unit, this module gives you that level of detail.

Fifth is Product Variants. This is where you manage combinations of things like colour and size. So if you sell a t-shirt that comes in three colours and four sizes, you don’t need twelve separate catalogue entries — you manage it as one product with variants.

Sixth is the Bill of Materials. A Bill of Materials tells the system what components go into making a finished product. It’s the recipe. If you manufacture anything, this is a foundational module because it defines what raw materials or sub-assemblies you need before you can produce the end result.

And seventh is Manufacturing Orders. This is where MRP-driven production happens. MRP stands for Material Requirements Planning, and what that means in practice is the system can look at what you need to produce, check your Bill of Materials, and work out what stock you need to fulfil that production run.

Now let’s talk about how all of this connects together in a typical workflow. The process starts with your Catalogue — you define what you’re making or selling. From there, you move to your Bill of Materials, where you specify what components are required. That feeds into a Manufacturing Order, which triggers the actual production process. Once production is complete, you get a Stock Movement — meaning your finished goods are recorded as entering your warehouse. And then finally, those goods flow out through Sales and Shipping.

So the chain looks like this in practice: you set up your product, you define its recipe, you raise an order to make it, the stock gets updated when it’s done, and then it goes out to the customer. Each step feeds the next, which is what makes this module set so powerful when you have it configured correctly.

It’s also worth noting how Product Management connects to the rest of the Dolibarr system. Customer Orders consume your stock when a sale is made, so the two are tightly linked. Purchase Orders work in the other direction — when your stock is running low, you use Purchase Orders to replenish it from your suppliers. And if you want to understand how profitable your products actually are, the Margins module ties in here too, letting you see product profitability across your catalogue.

So to pull it all together — Product Management is the backbone of your operational system. It’s not just a list of things you sell. It’s a connected set of tools that track what you have, how you make it, what it costs, and how it moves. Whether you’re a product-based business, a manufacturer, or somewhere in between, understanding these seven sub-modules and how they interact will save you a significant amount of time and guesswork.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.