Manufacturing ERP built around the customer schedule
Your plan changes when your customer's plan changes, and you find out by email on a Friday.
What should an auto component manufacturer look for in an ERP?
Three things decide it: whether the system holds today's committed quantity per part against a schedule that keeps moving, whether traceability runs part to batch to supplier without a parallel register, and whether a delay becomes visible to you before your customer calls about it.
The schedule moves more than the plan does
A tier one customer revises the pull, and a plan built on last week's numbers is wrong before the shift starts. What matters is today's committed quantity per part, what is in process against it, and which shortfall your customer will notice first. Planning that assumes a stable order book does not survive contact with an OEM.
Traceability is an audit requirement, not a nice to have
IATF 16949 means a part has to trace back to its batch, its heat number and its supplier, and the record has to be the same one production ran on. A traceability register maintained alongside the system is the thing that fails an audit, because the two never quite agree.
Rejection and rework carry a customer-visible cost
A rejection here is a PPM number your customer tracks and scores you on. First pass yield per operation, per shift, per machine has to be a number the plant already has, not one somebody assembles the week before a review.
Kanban, milk runs and packaging are part of the despatch
Returnable bins, labelled boxes, ASN and a delivery window measured in hours. Despatch paperwork that assumes a lorry and an invoice misses most of what an auto supplier actually does at the gate.
Tooling and setup time are the real capacity constraint
On a plant running dozens of part numbers across shared presses, changeover is where the capacity goes. Setup time booked against the job, and not averaged across the month, is what makes a scheduling conversation useful.
Production planning and tracking
Committed quantity per part against the live schedule, work in process visible per operation, and setup time booked separately from run time so changeover stops hiding inside the shift.
Quality and traceability
Inspection results recorded against the batch rather than in a parallel register, heat and supplier traceable through to the despatched part, and first pass yield per operation available without assembling it by hand.
Despatch, GST and e-way bill
Returnable packaging tracked, despatch documents carrying the batch the QC record refers to, and e-way bills generated from the same despatch rather than keyed again.
Purchase and vendors
Supplier schedules derived from your own, with in-process and in-transit visible, so a shortage shows up while there is still time to act on it.
Can the system handle changing OEM schedules?
Yes. Facto holds the committed quantity per part against the current schedule rather than against the original order, so when a customer revises the pull the plan reflects it and the shortfall is visible the same day rather than at the next review meeting.
Does Facto support IATF 16949 traceability requirements?
Facto records inspection results and batch, heat and supplier links against production itself, so the traceability record and the production record are the same data. That is the part auditors test, because a separate register kept alongside the system almost never agrees with it.
Can we track rejection PPM by customer and part?
Yes. Rejections are booked against the operation and the part that produced them, so first pass yield and PPM come out of the same records the floor already enters, per shift, per machine and per customer.