Manufacturing ERP Modernization
A custom, hybrid-deployment ERP that replaced Tally-and-spreadsheets for a 250-employee auto-components manufacturer near Gwalior — unifying production, inventory and billing in a single real-time dashboard and eliminating month-end reconciliation chaos.
The Challenge
The manufacturer ran three production units — a foundry, a machining shop and an assembly unit — on a patchwork of Tally for accounting, separate Excel sheets for each unit's inventory, and hand-written job cards on the shop floor. There was no single source of truth for material flow, WIP or costing. Three units meant three sets of spreadsheets, emailed between supervisors who often disagreed on what the numbers actually meant.
Inventory blind spots were the biggest pain point. Stores would issue raw material to a job card that production believed was already closed; reconciliation happened only at month-end, by which time pilferage, mis-issues and stockouts had already disrupted the production plan. Downtime on critical CNC machines averaged 14 hours per month — often caused by nothing more than "we forgot to reorder that consumable in time."
Leadership had no real-time visibility into WIP, dispatch or outstanding receivables. Month-end close routinely took 12 working days and surfaced six-figure reconciliation gaps that nobody could cleanly explain. The owners knew they had outgrown their tooling — but two previous attempts at buying a packaged ERP had stalled, once on cost and once on the perceived disruption of a big-bang migration.
"We were running a 250-person company on Excel files emailed between units. By the time we knew a stockout had happened, the line had already stopped." — Plant Manager, V____
Our Solution
Curio's consultants began with a four-week on-site audit — interviewing unit heads, stores in-charges and the accounts team, mapping every material and information flow from purchase order to dispatch, and cataloguing the gaps in the existing Tally setup. We deliberately did not start with software; we started with the process.
Based on that audit, we designed and built a custom ERP on Node.js + React, modelled around the client's actual manufacturing process — job-card-driven, multi-stage bill of materials (BOM), batch traceability and shop-floor data capture. Rather than force-fit a packaged product and retrain 250 people to match it, we built around the way the team already worked.
Migration was deliberately phased to avoid a big-bang cutover: accounts went live first (parallel-run with Tally for 30 days for verification), then stores and procurement, then shop-floor job cards, then dispatch and invoicing. Each of the three units went live independently with a 7-day overlap window, so any issue could be contained. The deployment was hybrid — an on-prem server at the plant for low-latency shop-floor terminals, mirrored to a cloud instance for management dashboards and remote owner access — with Zabbix monitoring, daily encrypted backups and a documented disaster-recovery runbook.
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AuditFour-week on-site workflow + system audit, PO-to-dispatch flow mapping, Tally gap analysis.
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Custom ERP DesignData model, multi-stage BOM logic, job-card-driven screen flows, role-based access design.
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Migration (Phased)Accounts → stores → shop-floor → dispatch, with parallel-run and 7-day overlap per unit.
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Server Setup + MonitoringOn-prem + cloud hybrid deployment, Zabbix monitoring, daily encrypted backups, DR runbook.
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Training + Go-Live250 users trained in role-based batches, Hindi/English handbook, 90-day hypercare via dedicated WhatsApp line.
Results & Impact
The biggest immediate win was visibility. For the first time, the plant manager could see WIP at every stage, stock positions across all three stores, and pending POs on a single dashboard — updated in real time from shop-floor terminals. Stockout-driven CNC downtime fell from 14 hours/month to under 4 within the first quarter, because reorder points were now automated instead of remembered.
Month-end close dropped from 12 working days to 6, because reconciliation gaps were caught and corrected during the month rather than discovered at the end. Inventory carrying cost came down 30% as procurement shifted from "reorder when remembered" to "reorder when stock hits safety level" — driven by the ERP's automated reorder logic and a single shared view of demand across all three units.
"Curio built the system around our process, not the other way around. The dashboards are now the first thing I check every morning — and the last thing at night. For the first time, all three units are on the same page." — Plant Manager, V____
Services Used
Software Development
Custom ERP on Node.js + React, modelled around the client's actual job-card-driven manufacturing process.
Explore serviceServer Management
Hybrid on-prem + cloud deployment with Zabbix monitoring, daily backups and a documented DR runbook.
Explore serviceIT Consultation
Four-week process audit and ERP design that mapped the workflow before any code was written.
Explore service