Inventory Management Software for Manufacturing Units

ERPNext costs nothing to licence. The software is open source, so if you have a server and someone who can run it, the software bill is zero. Frappe Cloud, the managed hosting service from the company behind ERPNext, charges for compute rather than per user: shared Site plans start at $5 per site per month (roughly ₹410), dedicated Server plans from $40 a month (roughly ₹3,600). Put twenty more people on the floor and a per-user ERP bill grows with them. This one doesn't.

What earns it first place is the stock module rather than the manufacturing one. Warehouses are a tree, so a plant can contain stores, a WIP area and a finished-goods bay and still roll up to one figure. Every movement writes to a stock ledger that reconciles against the value in your books, so a mismatch is visible rather than discovered at year end. Valuation runs FIFO or moving average per item. Landed Cost Vouchers push freight and duty into the value of imported material instead of leaving it as a separate expense — which matters the moment you're costing a part made from imported steel.

On top of that sits the production layer: multi-level BOMs with revision control, a Production Plan that checks material availability across warehouses before committing, work orders that transfer material and generate job cards, and stock reservation so material earmarked for a job can't be quietly consumed by another. Reorder levels raise Material Requests automatically. Subcontracting is a full workflow, not a challan register.

Focus Softnet splits its offer across three products rather than one: Focus MRP for manufacturing resource planning, Focus WMS for warehousing, and Focus X as the ERP core. It's the only vendor here that treats warehousing as a product in its own right, which usually means the workflows were designed for warehouse staff rather than adapted from a counter screen.

The inventory module is where Focus earns its position. It supports five valuation methods — weighted average, FIFO, LIFO, batch rate and standard — which is the widest choice on this page and matters when your auditor and your costing team want different views of the same stock. Bins are configurable on the item master. Reorder levels can be set per product or per product group, with auto-indenting when stock drops below them, and the stock check runs against orders in process and existing reservations rather than raw quantity on hand. Batches carry manufacturing and expiry dates, and the module automatically detects and rejects stock nearing expiry — expiry control enforced by the system rather than by whoever is picking. ABC analysis ranks stock by value, and reports cover fastest, slowest and ageing stock.

Focus MRP adds bill of materials management, cycle-time analysis, real-time availability tracking, change request management, shop-floor control and multi-location support. Focus also names demand forecasting explicitly, describing it as analysis of historical sales, seasonal trends and market conditions — which is what lets you hold buffer stock deliberately rather than by accident.

LOGIC ERP publishes an unusually specific inventory feature list, and it reads like it was written by someone who has stood in a godown. Stock is tracked item-wise, batch or lot-wise and serial-number-wise across multiple godowns and branches. Storage goes down to bin and rack level, and you can define both product dimensions and bin dimensions so the system calculates capacity by volume as well as by unit count — genuinely uncommon at this end of the market.

Valuation supports FIFO, LIFO, weighted average, moving weighted average and standard cost, which matters when your auditor and your costing team want different views of the same stock. Movement itself can be FIFO, LIFO or actual. Goods in transit are tracked as their own state with reconciliation across locations, so material that has left one branch and not yet reached another isn't invisible for three days.

Two features stand out for anyone whose working capital is sitting in stock. Dead and slow-moving stock reporting is a named module rather than a report you have to build, and inventory turnover ratio is calculated for you. Together they answer the question most factory owners can't answer on demand: how much of what we're holding is actually earning anything?

Odoo publishes rupee pricing for India. The Standard plan is ₹580 per user per month billed yearly, discounted from ₹725, or ₹760 billed monthly, discounted from ₹950. The Custom plan — which adds Odoo Studio, multi-company, the external API and the on-premise option — runs ₹890 per user per month billed yearly, discounted from ₹1,150. There's also a One App Free tier: one app, unlimited users, forever. Run Inventory alone and you pay nothing; add Manufacturing and you're on Standard.

Do the arithmetic before you commit, because per-user pricing compounds. Ten people on Standard yearly is roughly ₹69,600 a year at the discounted rate, but the discount covers only the first twelve months for initial users, so year two is closer to ₹87,000. At around twenty-nine users, Odoo costs more per year than ERPDrive's flat ₹2,00,000. That matters more than it sounds, because inventory accuracy depends on storekeepers and supervisors recording movements themselves — and this pricing model charges you for every one of them.

What you get for it is the best stock model here after ERPNext. Odoo models stock the way an accountant models money. Nothing is created or destroyed — every quantity moves from one location to another, including locations that represent a supplier, a customer, scrap or production. The practical result is that stock always balances and every movement has a counterpart, which is why discrepancies show up as an entry rather than as a mystery at year end.

Storage goes down to shelves, aisles, cold rooms and pallet racks. Putaway rules route incoming material automatically based on storage categories and real-time capacity, and removal strategies let you pick FIFO, FEFO (first-expiry-first-out, which is what food and pharma actually need), LEFO or nearest available zone. Picking can run single, batch, cluster or wave. Inventory adjustments can be scheduled as recurring counts on specific locations, products or lots, which is cycle counting built into the product rather than bolted on as a discipline.

On replenishment, reordering rules with minimum and maximum levels trigger purchases, inter-warehouse transfers or manufacturing orders — the same rule handles all three, which is exactly the behaviour a factory needs. The forecast report calculates out-of-stock dates from customer orders, shipment dates and manufacturing orders. Subcontracting is a named route: confirm the order, auto-generate the delivery of raw material to the vendor, bill them, and run a quality check before the part ships onward.

ERPDrive sells one plan and publishes the price: ₹2,00,000 a year plus 18% GST, unlimited users, all modules included, with discounts up to 30% for multi-year commitments. Flat pricing is rare here and it makes budgeting simple in a way custom quotes never are.

Its inventory module is described in exactly the terms a factory would use: raw materials, WIP and finished goods tracked across multiple warehouses and stores, with reorder alerts, batch and serial traceability, and real-time stock visibility. The three states aren't an afterthought — they're how the module is introduced.

The feature that justifies its place here is job-work tracking, and it's the most detailed treatment of the problem on this page. Outward challans link to the production order. Returns are recorded against the original challan split three ways — accepted after inspection, rejected, and scrap — with scrap categorised by reason and partial returns supported across multiple lots. Vendor scorecards rank job workers on on-time return, rejection rate and turnaround. Multi-process routing tracks a part moving from a machining vendor to a heat-treatment vendor to a plating vendor with separate challans at each stage. If a meaningful share of your inventory lives at vendor premises, this is the module to look at.