Practical advice on ERP, inventory, production planning, GST compliance, and running a lean, profitable factory.
The OEMup blog is written for owners and operators of Indian manufacturing SMEs — pump shops, plastic moulders, fabricators, food processors, chemical units — who are tired of running their business on Tally plus four spreadsheets and a WhatsApp group. We focus on practical, factory-floor problems: BOM management when your product has fifty parts, GST e-invoicing without an accountant on call, ITC-04 for job-work, payroll for shop-floor workers, and the operational hygiene that separates a 5-crore factory from a 50-crore one.
Posts are written by the team building OEMup — Komal Sonara (founder, two years on factory floors before writing a line of code), Ayush Patel (developer lead), and Rakesh Soni (team lead) — with primary sources cited where it matters (gov.in for GST regulation, Ministry of MSME for sector data).
Almost nobody is detained for filling the form in wrongly. They are detained by a clock that starts earlier than they think, runs in 200 km brackets, and can only be stopped inside an eight-hour window — plus what the 2026 changes actually are, and which ones are on hold.
The stock figure goes up the moment the challan is signed. Why the same defective castings cost twelve times more on the machine than at the gate, why machining a part counts as accepting it, and how to inspect by risk without building a quality lab.
Sixty enquiries arrived and twenty-three were written down. Why your quote-to-order rate measures the one part of the funnel that already works, the four questions that decide what deserves an estimator’s afternoon, and what one more won order a month is really worth.
By day sixty the goods are gone and all you have left is a phone call. Why the ledger clears a dispatch it should have stopped, where three-quarters of your overdue money actually sits, and the three-minute call that removes most of the problem before it starts.
Three of the four layers are measurement. The fourth — how you spread overhead — is a choice, and the base most SME shops pick makes them lose the quotes they should win and win the ones they should lose. Two batches of 40, worked to the rupee.
One “minimum level” typed in years ago is being asked to answer three questions at once. How to size the cushion by counting days instead of doing statistics — and why three-quarters of it is really there because suppliers run late.
“Adjust it in 3B” stopped working. GSTR-3B’s liability tables are now locked to GSTR-1, GSTR-1A is a one-shot window, and one unanswered DRC-01B blocks next month’s filing — five errors and the month-end sequence that prevents them.
Shot weight times shots never matches the granule you bought. The gap is runner and sprue, purge on colour change, startup shots, rejects and regrind nobody booked back — six leaks, and a four-line shift material balance that closes them.
Your customer sends a rolling release, not a purchase order — and revises it weekly. The six things an auto-ancillary ERP must get right that a generic one doesn’t: schedule-driven MRP, lot genealogy in both directions, PPM at the operation, weight-based costing, job work under ITC-04 and customer-owned tooling.
The six jobs a supplier portal takes off your purchase team — onboarding and KYC, RFQ quoting, purchase orders, rate contracts, shipments and payment status — the India-specific gaps generic tools miss, and a five-step rollout that suppliers actually use.
Multi-level BOMs, make-and-buy parts, made-to-order variants and thin margins collide on every pump. Where the complexity hides, a spreadsheets-vs-ERP comparison, and how one connected system shortens lead times and makes margins visible.
Where SME factories leak material and cash across the procure-to-pay chain — indent, PO, GRN, three-way match, payment — a worked ₹80L example, and the 5-step routine to plug every gap.
Most factories don’t lose orders on price — they lose them in a WhatsApp thread or an un-followed quotation. The five sales leaks, a worked example, and the 5-step routine to plug them with a manufacturing CRM.
From spreadsheets and printed job cards to one platform — how an Ahmedabad pump maker put its multi-model BOMs, inventory and GST on a manufacturing ERP customised to its workflow.
Planning vs control, the four stages (routing, scheduling, dispatching, follow-up), core functions and objectives, scheduling types, and a worked pump-factory example.
The one formula behind every steel chart, per-shape volume formulas, a density table you can trust, three worked examples, and the unit mistakes that quietly eat your margin.
The missing piece between MRP and the shop floor. Finite vs infinite capacity, the bottleneck principle, a worked CNC example, the four levels of capacity planning, and what an Indian SME actually needs vs SAP-grade APS.
The four inputs MRP needs, the five-step run walked through with a real 1HP-pump example, and the five settings that decide if MRP gives you gold or garbage.
The BOM tree, the six things multi-level lets you do, versioning that saves your costing, phantoms and alternate components — with a real 1HP-pump example from a launch customer.
The five laws that decide your payroll, the seven calculations behind every payslip, and the attendance-to-payslip loop that turns three days of monthly reconciliation into a one-click event.
Day-by-day plan from someone who has run this for 5 launch factories. What to export, the chart-of-accounts mapping that takes longest, parallel-run rules, and the 5 things that always go wrong.
The plain-English guide to Section 143 job-work compliance: due dates, the three mandatory documents, time limits, and the five mistakes GST officers flag in audits.
Dead stock, production delays, human errors, and inaccurate costing — discover the four silent margin killers in manual inventory systems.
Large ERP systems were built for large businesses. Here's why the fit is wrong for SMEs — and what purpose-built manufacturing ERP actually looks like.
OEMup, Zoho, TranZact, ERPNext and BUSY scored on the 8 criteria that matter for production. Decision matrix and migration guide included.
Two years walking factory floors across Indian manufacturing clusters, eighty conversations, and the day we finally started writing code.
Where Zoho Inventory's "composite items" stop working, what the full Zoho stack actually costs over 3 years, and a clear migration path.
The 7-step process, manufacturer-specific tips for multi-line BOM invoices and job-work, plus the 10 most common IRP error codes and their fixes.
Multi-level BOMs, MRP for a production run, lot traceability, mobile quoting, payroll-in-accounts — five concrete limits Indian manufacturers hit on Tally.
Side-by-side feature table, 3-year TCO calculation for a 5-user factory, and a clear answer on when to switch from Tally — and when to stay.
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