Case Study Food Manufacturing ERP 🇮🇳 Punjab, India
Unati Cooperative

From paper gate slips to a
gate-to-invoice ERP.

Digiwah moved Unati, a 195-person food cooperative in the Punjab foothills, onto one cloud ERP: gate, weighbridge, QC, manufacturing and finance on a single system, reaching all the way to the shop floor, and delivered inside a sub-₹5L budget.

₹3.6L/yr
Inside a ₹5L budget
4,000+
Items configured
318
QC templates
Live
Gate to invoice
The Client

Unati

The Unati Co-op. Marketing-cum-Processing Society is a farmer-and-community-owned cooperative in Punjab's Kandi belt, in the lower Shivalik foothills. It processes natural products: nutraceuticals, jaggery, fruit & vegetable preserves, and a dedicated vinegar line.

“Connecting Communities. Crafting Wellness. Cultivating Cooperation.”

Unati makes its own labels and privately processes for 100+ partner brands, all under FSSAI, GST and MSME regulation across two manufacturing units.

Industry
Regulated food manufacturing
Base
Kandi belt, Punjab
Scale
~195 staff · 2 units
Compliance
FSSAI · GST · MSME
Since
2003 · Top 5 co-op in India
NutraceuticalsJaggeryVinegarFruit & veg100+ brands
The Challenge

A regulated plant, running on paper

Unati ran on Marg ERP for accounts, Zenscale for payroll, and a great deal of paper and spreadsheets at the gate, the store and the QC bench. The mandate: consolidate onto one modern cloud ERP without disrupting a regulated food workflow, and stay inside a hard budget.

Paper gate slip
Weighbridge chit
Manual QC
Excel stock
Marg + Zenscale
⚠ no traceability
Paper at the gate
Hand-written gate slips and weighbridge chits, chased by hand into the office.
Inconsistent QC
Quality checks lived in people's heads and on paper, not in a system.
Fragmented systems
Marg, Zenscale and Excel, none of them talking to each other.
No traceability
No clean batch lineage from raw material to finished, invoiced product.
Within these constraints FSSAI-regulated 2 units 4,000+ SKUs 100+ brands Sub-₹5L budget Floor-first workforce
The Approach

One ERP for the spine.
Keep what already works.

Zoho ERP Premium became the system of record for finance, inventory, purchase and sales. Native Manufacturing and Quality ran the floor. Zoho Creator put apps in the hands of gate and store staff. And Zenscale stayed for payroll, integrated rather than ripped out, saving about ₹1.4L a year. Simplicity first: the simplest version that works, with complexity added only where the floor demanded it.

Replaced: Marg ERP + paper + Excel
Floor apps
Zoho Creator
Gate · Weighbridge · Verification
The spine
Zoho ERP
Finance · Inventory · Purchase · Sales
Kept & integrated
Zenscale
Payroll, not replaced
Watch it run

From the gate to the invoice

Follow a sack of raw material from the factory gate to a finished, batch-traced, invoiced product. This is the path it now takes, in production.

Floor apps Quality Inventory Manufacturing Finance
Unati Operations · Zoho
Zoho Creator · Gate Entry
GATE-1187 · inbound
Sugarcane · 9.2 MT
Vehicle PB-10-CD-4471 · linked to PO-3320
LOGGED
Weighbridge · auto-queued
0 kg
Slip photo Weigher: R. Singh
✓ Written back to Gate Entry
Physical Verification · store
Accepted Partial Rejected
Purchase Receipt · auto-created
GRN-2208 · Sugarcane 9.2 MT
Pushed to store operator · CEO notified
Quality · inspection auto-raised
Moisture % ≤ 12
Foreign matter ≤ 1%
Brix ≥ 18
Visual / colour
✓ Inspection PASS · 1 of 318 templates
Inventory · quarantine gate
Quarantine
Usable bin
QC PASS → Transfer Order
Stock released to HO / store bin
Manufacturing · BOM → MO
Cane juice Additive Pack +
MO-0461 · auto-backflush
Jaggery Powder 500g · FG batch UJP-2606
Components consumed from WIP
Traceability · batch genealogy
RM batchCANE-0419
FG batchUJP-2606
CustomerINV-5573
Traced raw material to invoice line
Finance · GST e-invoice
TAX INVOICEINV-5573
Apollo Ayurveda · Jaggery Powder 500g
Batch UJP-2606 · HSN 1701 · IGST 5%
e-Invoice IRN + ACK generated
The production engine

Production used to live in five places.
Now it runs as one.

For the people on the line: BOMs, material planning, work orders, work-center costing and quality, all connected. Every batch traceable from recipe to finished goods, with no paper recipe and no guesswork in a spreadsheet.

Before · scattered
Recipe on paper Stock in Excel QC on a clipboard Costing guessed No batch trace
After · one engine
Zoho Manufacturing + Quality
Zoho Manufacturing · live production run MO-0461 · Jaggery Powder 500g
BOM
Recipe + routing
Cane juice Jaggery additive 500g pack
MRP
Plan materials
Need12.0 MT
In stock9.2 MT
Shortfall 2.8 MT → PO
Work order
Manufacturing Order
MO-0461
Released to floor
Work centers
Operations + costing
Crushing
Boiling
Packing
Quality
FG gate + CoA
PASS CoA issued
FG batch
Traced output
UJP-2606 RM → FG → invoice
What was delivered

Ten phases, one integrated system

ERP core
Finance · Inventory · Purchase · Sales
  • Full Chart of Accounts: 18 banks, 84+ expense heads, opening balances
  • GST for both unit GSTINs, 6-digit HSN enforced
  • GST e-invoice template live (IRN/ACK), in daily use
  • Value-tiered PO approval matrix (4 rules)
  • Two-level bill approvals, payment blocked till cleared
  • Bin-level, location-aware inventory across 2 units
Quality & Manufacturing
The regulated core
  • 318 inspection templates, 250+ rules, auto-inspection
  • Quarantine-gated stock release via Transfer Order
  • Sampling SOP standardized (1% floor)
  • 11 Work Centers, structured BOMs & Manufacturing Orders
  • Auto-backflush consumption, verified live
  • Batch genealogy RM → FG → customer, with CoA
Floor apps & Integration
Creator + Zenscale
  • Gate Entry, Weighbridge, Physical Verification (Creator)
  • Photo evidence with write-back to ERP
  • Push notifications to the right store operator
  • Restricted Creator portal for gate & store staff
  • Zenscale payroll bridge (leave sync + journals)
  • OAuth Connections + scheduled REST backups
By the numbers

A migration measured in thousands

0+
Items configured
0
Contacts migrated
0
QC inspection templates
0+
QC rules loaded
0
Work centers
₹3.6L/yr
ERP footprint, inside budget
Under the hood

The architecture

Four integrated layers, stitched so a sack at the gate flows cleanly to a batch-traced, invoiced product.

A · ERP core
FinanceInventoryPurchaseSales
B · Manufacturing & Quality
Work CentersBOMsManufacturing OrdersInspection templates & rules
C · Creator floor apps
Gate EntryWeighbridgePhysical VerificationOperator portal
D · Integrations & governance
Zenscale bridgeOAuth ConnectionsRole-based accessDKIM / domain authBackups
01

Bulk data engineering at scale

Items, contacts, QC rules, bin mappings and brand-by-brand FG configuration driven through Zoho's REST APIs with paced, idempotent, stock-safe scripts.

02

Quality automation

The qualityspecifications API was used to clone, load and activate hundreds of inspection rules: boolean pass/fail and numeric Min/Max thresholds, item by item.

03

Deluge + OAuth Connections

The key insight that ERP custom functions need a named Connection to write back. Establishing it resolved a whole class of silent-write failures.

04

Creator ↔ ERP write-back

Push notifications to portal users via zoho.pushNotification, auto-record creation, and status round-tripping between the floor apps and the ERP.

The Outcome

What changed

One system, not four
Marg, Zenscale, paper and Excel became one Zoho ERP with Creator floor apps and an integrated Zenscale.
Inside budget
₹3.6L a year, comfortably under the ₹5L ceiling, with ~₹1.4L/yr saved by keeping Zenscale.
Gate-to-stock, digitized
Hand-written slips became a Gate → Weighbridge → Verification chain with photo evidence and write-back.
Quality at scale
318 templates and 250+ rules with auto-inspection and physical quarantine enforcement, not just paperwork.
Traceability end-to-end
Batch genealogy from raw material to finished goods to customer, on FSSAI and GST-compliant documents.
Last-mile reach
The ERP put in the hands of gate guards and store keepers, exactly where paper used to live.
Your operation, next

Running a regulated operation on legacy software and paper?

We design the operation, build the system, and stay till your team owns it. From the gate to the invoice, let's map your plant onto one platform the floor will actually use.

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