The proposal was as good as signed. Then it got measured against the budget for the year, and PPS International, three units in Greater Noida supplying seventeen railway zones and thirteen metro corporations, went back to a seven-level bill of materials that was still being maintained by hand in Excel.
PPS has been building components for Indian Railways and the metros since 2003, when P. K. Agarwal started it with Pratibha Agarwal after fifteen years in sales and marketing. The catalogue now runs from 25 kV overhead traction hardware through rolling stock electricals to platform screen doors, it's ISO 9001:2015 certified, and it was the first Indian company to install a fully indigenously developed retractable rigid catenary system.
All of that was planned in Excel.
How do you plan a seven-level bill of materials without an ERP?
Five hundred components, seven levels down
A rigid catenary system arrives as an assembly of assemblies. Sections, clamps, insulators, fittings, fasteners, each with its own sub-build underneath it, and several of those sub-builds have sub-builds of their own. The bills PPS works from run past five hundred components and go seven levels deep before they bottom out at a bought-out item or a length of raw stock.
Seven levels is roughly where a spreadsheet stops being a tool and becomes a second job. Change one fastener at level six and somebody edits it by hand in every parent that contains it, on every open order. Miss one and the shortage turns up on the floor weeks later, with a despatch date already attached to it.
The breadth of the catalogue compounds it. Cable harnesses, contactors, earthing switches, pantograph disconnecting devices, electrical panels, anti-bird discs, public address and passenger information systems. Different parents, overlapping children, and the overlap is the part nobody can hold in their head.
The quote that nearly got signed
Before Facto, PPS had an SAP Business One proposal in hand and had taken it close to final. It's a capable system, and our own comparison with SAP Business One sets out the places where it beats us rather than pretending there aren't any.
It came in over budget, and that ended it. We won't publish what was in it, partly because it isn't ours to publish and partly because licence and partner rates move, so a figure on a public page is wrong within a year. What's worth saying is the shape. A legacy ERP project arrives as several separate bills, and the licence line is usually the smallest of them, which is the arithmetic our note on what an ERP really costs over three years works through.
That's the part worth copying. By the time PPS spoke to us, the requirement had already been written down for somebody else's proposal, which meant the conversation started from a specification rather than a demo. Most plants reach a shortlist without that, and it's why we published an ERP evaluation scorecard to force the questions into writing early.
Production planning went on first, and it took the longest
We switch on the module where the missing information is. Here that was planning, so planning went first, and it's the honest low point of the eight weeks.
Getting a seven-level BOM into a system means somebody has to decide what the seven levels are. In Excel the structure had been implicit, held partly in file names, partly in column order, and partly in what Anoop Gupta on production knew about how a build really goes together. Making that explicit is slow, argumentative work, and no software does it for you. Anybody who tells you their implementation skips this step is describing a system that will confidently plan the wrong thing.
The other six functions went on faster, and they went on faster because the structure underneath them was already right. Sales, orders, purchase, quality control, vendor management and reporting all read off the same bill.
What changed
Planning time. A cycle that meant opening a stack of linked sheets and reconciling them by hand now runs off one structure. It got quicker, and more usefully it stopped depending on which particular person was free to do it that week.
Orders against their dates. Sameer Gupta on sales can see which orders are late and which are heading that way without asking production for a status first. A slipped date on a coach factory or metro order isn't a private matter between supplier and buyer, so seeing it early is worth more here than it would be in most plants.
Stock. Once the planning run walks the full structure, what the build needs falls out of it. Shortages show up as a requirement against a date instead of as a discovery on the floor. The general version of that, including how to set the levels so the system nags at the right time, is in our piece on reorder levels and preventing stockouts.
Facto brought structure and visibility across departments. Our order execution and production tracking are far more controlled now.P. K. Agarwal, Managing Director, PPS International
What we'd tell another engineering company
If your product has a deep bill of materials, the BOM is the project. Purchase, stores, despatch and quality all read off it, so a system built on a structure nobody agreed on will produce confident wrong answers faster than the spreadsheet ever did.
Budget for the argument about structure, and put your production people in the room for it. PPS spent the bulk of its eight weeks there. Everything downstream was quick precisely because that part wasn't.
What we configure first for make-to-order engineering work, from bought-out items booked against the job through to a planning run that walks the full structure, is on our job shop and fabrication page.
PPS International Private Limited manufactures overhead electrification hardware, rolling stock electricals, public address and passenger information systems, CCTV and metro platform screen doors from three units in Greater Noida. Founded in 2003 by P. K. Agarwal and Pratibha Agarwal, it's ISO 9001:2015 certified and supplies the Indian Railways coach factories and locomotive works, seventeen railway zones and thirteen metro corporations.
If your bills of materials go more than three levels deep and the planning still happens in a spreadsheet, book a walkthrough and bring one of your worst BOMs with you.