Manufacturing ERP
Raw material in, production out, and a cost per unit you can defend — built in phases, because a factory ERP done in one go is how projects fail.
Most factories know their selling price and guess their cost. Material is issued to production on a slip, some of it comes back as finished goods, some becomes wastage, and the gap between the two is explained rather than measured. Ask what a single unit cost to make last month and the answer is a calculation somebody does once, for a bank or an auditor, and nobody repeats.
This is the largest build in the catalogue and it should be treated as one. What gets built is store control, a bill of material, production orders against which material is issued and output received, and costing that falls out of those entries rather than being assembled separately. It is almost always built in phases — store and purchase first, production next, costing last — because a factory cannot change how it records everything at once and keep running.
What it fixes
- Raw material issued to production on a slip, with no reconciliation between what was issued, what was produced and what was wasted
- A bill of material that exists in the production manager's head, so a change in a formulation or a component is never reflected in costing
- Work in progress invisible — material has left the store and finished goods have not arrived, and nobody can say how much is sitting on the floor
- Cost per unit calculated once a year for the bank, and never used to price a job
- Purchase ordered against a shortage someone noticed, rather than against a production plan, so the store holds too much of one item and runs out of another
- Rejections and rework absorbed into general wastage, so a persistently bad process never becomes visible
What gets built
A starting point, not a fixed list. The build is scoped to your own process before anything is written.
Store and inventory control
Raw material, consumables, spares and finished goods with receipts, issues, returns and stock in hand per store. Batch or lot numbers where your material needs tracing.
Bill of material
What goes into each product and in what quantity, versioned so a change does not silently rewrite the cost of everything made before it.
Production orders
An order per batch or run, with material issued against it, output received, wastage and rejection recorded, and the order closed — which is what makes work in progress a number instead of an impression.
Purchase and supplier accounts
Purchase order, goods received against it, supplier bill and payment, with a running account per supplier and material rates over time.
Costing
Material cost from actual issues, plus labour and overhead applied by whichever method you already use, giving a cost per unit per batch rather than an annual estimate.
Sales and dispatch
Order, delivery challan, invoice and party account, with finished goods leaving stock when they leave the gate.
Who this is for
Manufacturing units with a real store, a production floor and someone whose job is already to reconcile the two — typically from fifty staff upwards, across engineering, plastics, chemicals, food processing, packaging and similar. It suits a factory where the owner has decided that costing matters enough to change how the floor records material. It does not suit a small workshop making to order with three people and no store, where the overhead of issuing and receiving against orders will not be maintained. Be realistic about the commitment: this is a major undertaking in both build time and in the discipline it asks of your staff, and the common failure is not the software but a floor that stops recording after a month. If a single area is hurting — usually store control or costing — building that alone and well is a better decision than attempting everything.
Questions
Why not just buy SAP, Oracle or an off-the-shelf ERP?
For some factories that is genuinely the right answer, and we will say so. An established package brings a tested process and a wide user base. The trade-off is that you adapt to its process, licensing recurs, and local customisation is expensive. A custom build fits how you actually work and has no licence fee, but it is built once for you and maintained by whoever built it. If your processes are standard, look at the packages seriously first.
How long before we see anything working?
Depends entirely on where we start, and we would rather start narrow. A phase covering store, purchase and supplier accounts is a focused build and you would be using it well before the rest exists. Production and costing come after, once the store data is reliable — costing built on top of a store nobody is updating produces confident, wrong numbers. We scope the phases against your floor first and commit to a timeline per phase, not for the whole thing.
Can it connect to our machines or weighing scales?
Often, and it depends on the make and the model. Many industrial scales and PLCs expose a serial or network output that can be read, and where they do, reading the weight directly removes a transcription error. But it has to be confirmed against your specific equipment — we would want the model numbers and ideally a look at the units before including any of it in scope. We would not quote machine integration on the assumption that it works.
Tell us how your factory runs.
We scope it first — what it takes, how long, what it costs. No obligation.