The challenge
An Indian industrial manufacturer and material sourcing company builds products to customer orders. Its sales, production and stores teams worked from separate records, and it wanted an ERP for engineering manufacturers in India that followed an order from first inquiry to the parts it uses.
On the sales side, contacts, items and inquiries lived in different places, and quotations were put together by hand. Open inquiries could go quiet because nothing prompted a follow-up.
Winning an order raised more questions. Which materials would it use, and did stores hold them? Faulty parts had to be swapped out, and every product needed a test certificate. Stock had to follow incoming deliveries without being typed in twice.
What we built
We built a web ERP in PHP Laravel and MySQL, running on an Ubuntu server. Shared customer, user and item masters keep every module on the same records, so a quotation, a bill of materials and a stock count all draw from one item list.
Sales. Items are stored by category with an indicative rate. The contact book holds every customer and prospect. Each inquiry is a lead that moves through four stages: unassigned, in progress, processed and completed. Calls and meetings are logged against it, and reminders flag leads still open.
Quotations. Staff pick the items a customer needs, and the system builds a quotation to send or print.
Production. A confirmed sales order gets a bill of materials listing the materials, parts and quantities it needs. Stock is allocated against it from stores, and faulty parts can be replaced. The system generates a test certificate for each product's quality check.
Inventory. The item master shows stock in hand. Purchase orders are split between manufactured items and bought-out parts. Entering a delivery challan adds the received items to stock.
Service. Service reports are uploaded and filed by client and by product.
How it works day to day
Follow one order. A new inquiry goes in as a lead and is assigned to someone in sales. Anyone can see its stage and what was last said, and a reminder appears if it sits open. The salesperson builds the quotation from the same item list the rest of the ERP uses.
When the customer confirms, production attaches a bill of materials to the order and draws materials from stores. Stores can see what has been allocated and raise purchase orders for any gap, split by manufactured and bought-out parts.
When the supplier's goods arrive, someone in stores enters the delivery challan, and the items join the stock count. The finished product's quality check ends in a test certificate. Later service visits are filed against the same customer and product.
The result
Sales staff see every inquiry, its stage and its history, and raise quotations from the item master instead of building them by hand. Production allocates materials against each order's bill of materials.
Stores update when a challan is entered, test certificates come from the system, and service reports are filed by client and product. Because every module shares the same masters, an order's history, from inquiry to after-sales service, sits in one system.
What the research says
ERP is standard for big firms, less so for smaller ones. Eurostat found that 46.45% of EU enterprises used ERP software in 2025, ranging from 41.08% of small enterprises to 88.71% of large ones (Eurostat, 2025). This build gives a mid-sized manufacturer the same joined-up flow, from quotation to bill of materials, stock and certificates.
Sellers spend most of their week not selling. A survey of 4,050 sales professionals by CRM vendor Salesforce found the average seller spends 40% of their time selling (Salesforce State of Sales, 2026). Quotations built from the item master, with indicative rates already in place, cut the typing behind every quote.
Coordination crowds out skilled work. Asana's Anatomy of Work Index, a survey of more than 10,000 knowledge workers by the work management vendor, found that 60% of time at work goes on work about work rather than skilled work (Asana). Here stock is added straight from the delivery challan and allocated against each order's bill of materials, so stores and production work from the same numbers.
Where AI fits next
None of these ideas is live in the system today. A model could suggest a bill of materials for a new order from similar past orders, for engineers to confirm. It could also read supplier delivery challans and pre-fill the stock entry, and rank open leads by how likely they are to close.
Planning an ERP for engineering manufacturers?
Before you build an ERP for an engineering business, answer four questions:
Does every quotation start from a single item list, with rates someone keeps current?
Who confirms a bill of materials, and who can swap a faulty part?
Which documents must each product carry, such as test certificates?
How do goods arrive today: on invoices, challans or both?
See how we approach ERP development and web application development, explore our work for manufacturers, or read our guide to ERP in the manufacturing industry.
