Industry Insights · · 6 min read
What Indian Factory Owners Really Want From Software
After weeks of listening to factory owners across Pune, Nashik, and Ahmednagar, one pattern emerged: they don't want more features. They want something simple that actually works.
Shivaji Kokate, founder, ERiKA SOFTWARES
Before we wrote a single line of code for SAMaGRA, I spent weeks doing something that most software companies skip: listening. Not pitching, not demoing, not selling — just listening. I visited manufacturing units across Pune, Nashik, and Ahmednagar. Small factories with 10-15 people. Mid-sized units with 50-80 workers. Family-run businesses that have been operating for two or three generations. Every conversation followed a surprisingly similar pattern.
A factory owner in Pune told me something that stuck: “My supervisor tracks 400 SKUs in his head. When he goes on leave, we don’t know what’s in stock.” Four hundred items — raw materials, work-in-progress, finished goods, consumables — all tracked by one person’s memory. When that person takes a day off or falls sick, the entire factory’s inventory knowledge walks out the door with him. This is not a technology problem. It is a single point of failure that has existed for years because the available software solutions were never simple enough to replace human memory.
Another owner in Nashik described his tech stack: “We use Tally for GST, Excel for inventory, WhatsApp for production updates. Nothing talks to each other.” This was the most common setup I encountered. Tally handles accounting and GST because it is required for compliance. Excel tracks inventory because it is flexible and everyone knows how to use it. WhatsApp coordinates production because it is instant and the entire team is already on it. Three tools, three separate data silos, and a factory owner who spends his evenings manually reconciling information across all three.
The problems I heard repeated across dozens of factories followed a clear pattern. Inventory is managed in Excel or in someone’s head. Production planning amounts to asking the question: what is urgent today? Month-end physical stock never matches the register. Every factory owner had tried software at some point — most had tried two or three different solutions. The software was either too complex for the team to adopt, too expensive for the scale of the business, or the vendor’s support disappeared after the first few months.
One owner in Ahmednagar summarized a failed implementation: “We paid 3 lakhs for software. The vendor came for training twice. After that, calls went unanswered. Within 4 months, we were back to Excel.” This story repeated with different numbers and different vendor names, but the outcome was always the same: money spent, time wasted, and a deeper skepticism about whether software could actually help.
What struck me most was what these factory owners were not asking for. Nobody asked for AI-powered analytics. Nobody asked for a mobile app with 50 features. Nobody asked for integration with 15 different platforms. The ask, across almost every conversation, was remarkably simple: “Give me something simple that actually works.”
Simple means the supervisor can update stock from his phone without calling the office. Works means the data is accurate and the system does not crash during peak dispatch hours. Actually works means the vendor is still answering calls six months after installation. That is the bar. And the Indian ERP market has consistently failed to clear it for the SME manufacturing segment.
The reason is straightforward. Most ERP products are designed top-down — built for large enterprises and then stripped down for smaller customers. But a stripped-down enterprise ERP is not a simple ERP. It is a complex ERP with features removed. The mental model, the navigation, the terminology — all of it still carries the weight of its enterprise origins. A shop floor supervisor with a 12th-pass education should not need to understand what “material requisition” means to issue stock to a production line.
This is why we are building SAMaGRA from the ground up for this specific segment. Not adapting an enterprise product downward. Not building a generic small business tool. Building specifically for the Rs 5-50 crore Indian manufacturer who needs inventory visibility, production tracking, GST-compliant invoicing, and nothing else until they are ready for more.
The Indian manufacturing sector contributes 17% to the country’s GDP and employs over 27 million people. The majority of these manufacturers are SMEs running on paper and Excel. They are not waiting for better software — they have stopped believing better software exists. Our job is to prove them wrong, one factory at a time.