Off Tally, onto a real ledger: a 3-plant manufacturing ERP

Vishwa Precision Components machines and heat-treats safety-critical parts for automotive tier-1 buyers, from three plants: Bhiwadi, Pune and Coimbatore. ₹180 crore turnover, nine years of history, and records kept in Tally ERP 9 plus about forty Excel workbooks with names like Stock_Master_FINAL_v3_USE_THIS.xlsx.

The problem was not that Tally was bad. It was that Tally was being asked to be an ERP.

Tally is excellent accounting software. But it does not run the shop floor, and it was never going to answer the four questions that were hurting this business:

• Where is my work-in-progress? Material issued to the shop floor left the books and reappeared, days later, as finished goods. In between, ₹6–8 crore of inventory was invisible. Plant heads estimated WIP. The word they used was "estimate".
• Which parts came from which heat lot? Their IATF 16949 duties to OEM customers require tracing by lot. If a batch of steel turns out to be bad, they must find every part made from it. Answering that question took two people about two days of digging through paper job cards. In a live recall, two days is not an answer.
• What did we own on 31 March? Stock quantities lived in Excel cells that anyone could overwrite. There was no way to rebuild the stock position of an earlier date. So every year-end valuation became an argument with the auditors.
• What is at the subcontractor? Job-work challans and the ITC-04 return were put together by hand each quarter from a folder of paper. Material sitting with a job-worker was, in practice, material that had vanished.

Month-end close took fourteen days. By the time the numbers were ready, they described a month that was already two weeks old and no use for decisions.

The switch was on 1 October, at the end of the second parallel quarter. Nothing went wrong, which is the highest praise an ERP switch can get.

The numbers

• Month-end close: 14 days → 3 days. The finance team did not type faster. The data no longer had to be put together, because it was already a ledger.
• Stock accuracy: 91.4% → 99.2%, measured by how far cycle counts differ from the system stock. The remaining 0.8% is almost all a known pattern of stock loss at one plant. They now know about it because they can finally see it.
• Heat-lot traceability: 2 days → under 4 minutes. This one was tested for real seven months after go-live, when an OEM customer asked a question about a material. They answered the same afternoon. Their quality head told us it was the first time in nine years that a traceability request had not ruined a week.
• 2.4M vouchers migrated with zero balance drift, verified against Tally across two full quarters of parallel running before anyone was allowed to switch anything off.

What it unlocked

WIP is now visible almost live, and the ₹6–8 crore that used to disappear between issue and finished goods is now a number on a dashboard. The ITC-04 job-work return used to take two people every quarter. Now it is made from the move ledger in one click, because material at a subcontractor is just a location in the ledger like any other.

The plant heads stopped estimating. That is the whole project, in three words.