How Alfa Pumps Runs Pump Manufacturing on OEMup

Every pump that leaves the Alfa Pumps factory in Ahmedabad is the end of a long chain — a chosen model, a material of construction, a set of components, some made in-house and some sent out for machining, all of it needing to stay traceable from raw material to dispatch. For years, that chain was held together by spreadsheets, printed job cards, and the experience of a team that simply knew how things worked.

As the model range and the order book grew, that way of working started to cost time. So Alfa Pumps became one of the first five manufacturers to go live on OEMup — and one of the first to ask us to make the system fit a pump factory rather than the other way around. This is their story, in their Chairman’s words and ours.

The problem: too much truth living in Excel

The bill of material for each pump lived in an Excel file that had to be updated by hand whenever a design changed. Stock figures were only as current as the last person who remembered to update them. Tracing which batch of material went into which pump — and finding it again months later when a customer called — meant chasing entries across separate registers.

None of this was a crisis on any single day. Added up across a month, it was the difference between a smooth close and a slow one.

“Our team always knew how to build a good pump. What we didn’t have was one place where the whole factory could see the same numbers. Too much of our business was living in one person’s Excel file.” — Narendra Patel, Chairman, Alfa Pumps (P) Ltd

Why a manufacturing ERP — and why a customised one

Alfa Pumps didn’t want a generic accounting tool, and didn’t want a heavy foreign ERP that would force the shop floor to change how it worked. They wanted a system that already understood manufacturing — multi-level BOMs, manufacturing orders, inventory and GST as one connected flow — and that could be shaped to pump-specific needs.

That second part mattered most. Rather than hand over a fixed product, our team sat with theirs and made custom changes so the system matched their process: model-wise multi-level BOMs, and reporting built around how a pump unit is actually costed and tracked.

What runs on OEMup today

The work that used to be spread across spreadsheets and registers now lives on one platform:

• Multi-model BOMs — each pump model’s multi-level bill of material is maintained once, so a change is reflected everywhere instead of in five different files.
• Production & manufacturing orders — visible to the team, not locked in one person’s notebook.
• Inventory — stock reflects what is actually on the floor, so fewer last-minute surprises hold up production.
• GST invoicing — part of the same system, so billing lines up with what was actually produced and shipped.

“What convinced me was that OEMup did not ask us to change how we make pumps. They changed the software to fit us. Now the whole team works from the same live information — production, stock and billing in one place.” — Narendra Patel, Chairman, Alfa Pumps (P) Ltd

The takeaway for other manufacturers

If you run a pump, valve or general engineering unit and you’re still holding everything together with spreadsheets, the lesson from Alfa Pumps is simple: you don’t have to change how your factory works to get organised. The right system adapts to you. That is the whole idea behind our ERP for pump and valve manufacturers — manufacturer-shaped, India-first on compliance, and flexible where your process is genuinely different.

Alfa Pumps is one of five launch manufacturers now running daily orders, BOMs and GST invoices on OEMup. We’re proud to build for factories like theirs — and grateful they let us tell the story.

Related reading: ERP for Pumps & Valves · Multi-level BOM explained · Job-work & ITC-04 · Why we built OEMup