ERP Business Analyst in Pune

Bought by the kilogram, sold by the piece

Forging and casting suppliers around Pune live with a units problem that generic ERP demos skip. Steel bars or billets arrive by weight, are cut into slugs, forged or cast with some loss, trimmed, machined and finally sold to the customer by the piece. Castings may arrive from a foundry by weight but be machined and counted individually. At each step, part of the material becomes flash, runners, turnings or rejected pieces, and some of it is sold as scrap.

If the ERP is not told how this works, inventory and costing drift apart from reality within weeks. In the requirement document I capture:

• Unit of measure for each item at each stage, with standard conversion weights and how they are revised
• Expected yield per operation and how actual loss is recorded against it
• How end pieces and leftover bar lengths are stored and reused
• How saleable scrap is weighed, stocked, valued and sold
• How price changes in raw material are passed on to customers, where contracts allow it

Each item becomes a test case using one of your real part numbers. That lets you see quickly whether a platform handles dual units and yield naturally, or only through workarounds that someone will have to maintain.

Special machines designed for each order

Pune has many builders of special purpose machines, test rigs, fixtures, conveyors and automation cells, often serving the same vehicle and component plants nearby. Their work is engineer-to-order: every inquiry leads to a design, a quotation with assumptions, a purchase list that keeps changing as drawings are finalized, assembly, a trial at the builder's premises, dispatch and commissioning at the customer's plant.

Requirements for such a business are closer to a project system than a repetitive production system. I document how a project is opened from an accepted quotation, how a design bill of materials becomes a purchase and manufacturing list, how bought-out items like drives and controllers are reserved for one project, and how labor and travel for commissioning are charged.

Billing needs equal care. Advance, dispatch and commissioning milestones, retention held until the warranty period ends, and change orders from the customer all affect cash and margin. I write these rules so that a project's cost and billing position can be reported at any stage. My project costing page explains the general approach; here it is applied to a machine builder's real milestones.

Stock held at the customer's end

Some suppliers in the region do not get paid when parts leave their gate. Parts may be held in a warehouse near the customer's assembly line, run by the customer or a logistics provider, and invoiced only when the customer reports consumption. Others send parts on a returnable packaging cycle where bins and trolleys must also be tracked.

This creates requirements that an ERP sales module does not cover by default. I document where consigned stock is held, how it is moved there, how consumption reports from the customer are received and checked, when and how the invoice is raised, and what happens with discrepancies between what was sent and what the customer says was used. Returnable packaging needs its own register by customer and location.

The GST and accounting treatment of stock held at a customer's or third party's premises should be confirmed with your chartered accountant, because it affects documents and timing. My job is to make sure the requirements ask the right questions so that the chosen system and the advice match. A good starting point for the stock side is my inventory and warehousing page.

Export orders with their own rules

A growing number of Pune component and machine makers ship directly to overseas customers, including plants of the same groups they supply in India. Export orders bring requirements that domestic sales do not. Customers specify packing materials, labels and marking. Prices may be in euros, dollars or yen, and the exchange difference between invoicing and receipt has to be recorded. Shipments carry documents such as commercial invoices, packing lists and certificates of origin.

I capture these as part of the order-to-cash requirements rather than leaving them to a separate spreadsheet. Typical items include customer-specific packing instructions attached to the item or order, foreign currency price lists, shipment status tracking from dispatch to arrival, and the link between each export invoice and its realization.

Customs procedures, export benefits and the tax treatment of exports change over time and depend on your situation. I mark them in the BRD as points for your customs broker and tax advisor to confirm, rather than writing assumptions into requirements. For the general India requirement topics such as GST, e-invoicing and TDS, see my India ERP business analyst page.

Workshops that fit around shifts

The people who know how a plant really works are the shift supervisors, stores keepers and planners, and they are the hardest to pull into long meetings. I run requirement workshops remotely in short sessions, timed around shift changes and planning meetings, with a clear agenda and sample documents shared in advance.

Shop floor vocabulary matters. Supervisors may describe stages, defects and documents in Marathi, Hindi or plant-specific English terms. The engagement runs in English, so I keep a glossary that maps each local term to the requirement it belongs to, and a bilingual member of your team checks it. That avoids the common problem of an implementer configuring a field name nobody on the floor recognizes.

At the end you receive current process maps, the numbered BRD, scenario test scripts using your parts, and a fit-gap matrix for shortlisted platforms. Where a factory visit would genuinely add something, it can be arranged, but the analysis does not depend on it. The Pune ERP consultant page and my BRD consulting service describe what happens next.