Production planning in one tool, inventory in another, dispatch on WhatsApp, and finance reconciling all of it manually every month. Growth had turned coordination into the plant's biggest bottleneck.
A modular custom ERP built around their actual order-to-dispatch flow: sales orders, production scheduling against furnace capacity, stores and scrap accounting, quality gates, dispatch with e-way integration, and a finance layer that reconciles automatically.
The breaking point
Every month-end, finance chased production for numbers that never matched stores, and dispatch commitments were made from memory because nobody could see committed capacity against confirmed orders. The group had already tried a packaged ERP once and abandoned it: the template it imposed described a different kind of plant, and the workarounds needed to run the real one ended up back in the spreadsheets the system was bought to replace.
Engineering to the process
Four weeks on the shop floor before a single module was proposed. The resulting system mirrors how material actually moves — heats, batches, yields, scrap — so operators log reality rather than an approximation that has to be corrected later. Scheduling runs against furnace capacity rather than an abstract work centre, and quality gates sit where material is genuinely accepted or rejected. Adoption followed because the software finally agreed with the floor.
Dispatch is where the plant meets the tax system
Order-to-dispatch ends in a document, and in India that document is an e-way bill raised against the invoice as the vehicle leaves. Handled in a separate portal it becomes a second data entry and a standing source of mismatches. Built into dispatch, it becomes a by-product of a movement that had to be recorded anyway.
Compounding returns
With one source of truth, month-end closing fell from nine days to two and stock discrepancies dropped 31%. The larger change is what those numbers made possible: a discrepancy surfaces in hours rather than at the next quarter's count, and management reads a morning dashboard that used to take three analysts a week to compile.