ERP for Auto Parts & Engineering

The work as it actually flows, stage by stage

An order for 5 000 pressed bearing housings arrives. The sales team converts the quotation into a job card (Sales & Order Book). The card lists the part number, drawing revision, material grade, quantity and promised date. Planning loads the job onto a 100-tonne press (Production & Planning) and issues a material requisition to Stores for 1.2 tonnes of EN-8 steel coil. Stores picks the coil, weighs it on the floor scale and issues a gate pass for the exact weight sent to the press line. The press operator logs the start time, coil batch number and shift output on a touch terminal; every 200 pieces the in-process QC station records a 4-point score (Quality Control). When the job is complete, the finished parts are weighed again, the actual yield is posted to the job card, and the parts move to the packing station where a packing list is printed (Inventory & Stores). The gate pass is closed when the packed cartons leave the plant, and the invoice is raised from the same job card (Sales & Order Book).

The material problem: coils, off-cuts and sub-contract reconciliation

In auto parts, the same coil is used for multiple jobs. A 2-tonne coil may be issued to Job A (800 kg), Job B (600 kg) and sent to a sub-contractor for Job C (400 kg). The remaining 200 kg is returned to Stores as an off-cut. If the sub-contract gate pass is not reconciled, the 400 kg is written off as scrap. Over a year, a single press line can lose 12–15 tonnes of steel this way. Recording every gate pass as a returnable document forces the sub-contractor to return either the parts or the unused coil. The system matches the returned weight against the issued weight and posts the variance to the job cost sheet. No variance, no write-off.

What costing looks like in this industry

Cost per piece is built from actuals, not standards. The illustration below is for a run of 5 000 bearing housings on a 100-tonne press.

The system posts every element from the actual documents: material from the gate pass, wages from the payroll run, electricity from the meter reading, sub-contract from the GRN. The illustration shows a 4 % variance against the quotation of £0.45 per piece. The variance is visible the moment the job is closed, not weeks later when the invoice is raised.

The controls that matter: approvals, roles and traceability

• Approval chains. Any material issue above £1 000 or any sub-contract gate pass must be approved by the plant manager. The system routes the document to the manager’s dashboard and will not post the stock movement until approval is given (Dynamic Approvals).
• Role-based access. The press operator sees only the touch terminal screen for shift output. The stores clerk sees only the gate pass screen. The accountant sees the cost sheet but cannot edit the material rate (Roles, Users & Audit).
• Traceability. Every coil batch number is recorded on the material requisition. If a customer reports a crack, the system can trace the coil back to the steel mill certificate and forward to every job that used the same batch (Inventory & Stores).
• Audit trail. The system logs who created, edited or deleted any document, the timestamp, the device and the IP address. If a gate pass is altered after approval, the audit log shows the change and the approver is notified (Activity Tracking & Session Replay).

What a rollout touches first, and what can wait

Most plants start with three modules: Sales & Order Book, Inventory & Stores, and Production & Planning. These capture the daily flow of orders, material and output without disrupting payroll or finance. The first win is the live order book: everyone sees which jobs are late, which are on track and which are waiting for material. Stores stops issuing negative stock because the system enforces the physical balance. Production posts actual shift output against the plan, so the planner knows within the hour if a job is running slow.

After the first month, Quality Control and Product Costing are added. QC records the 4-point score on the touch terminal; the score is visible on the job card and on the Business Control Centre. Costing starts posting actuals to the job sheet, so the sales team can see the margin the day the job closes. Finance & Accounts and HR & Payroll are usually rolled out in the third month, once the operational data is clean. The double-entry accounting posts itself from the gate passes, job cards and payroll runs, so the trial balance is always up to date.

Where the system would need custom work for this industry

The standard product assumes a single-level bill of material. In auto parts, a single job may have a multi-level BOM: a pressed housing, a welded bracket, a machined shaft and a sub-contracted plating operation. The system can record each level as a separate job card, but the cost roll-up to the parent job is not automatic. A custom script can be written to sum the child job costs into the parent job sheet. The script runs overnight and posts the rolled-up cost to the parent job, so the margin is visible the next morning. The custom work is typically two to three days of development and testing.