Procurement runs on inboxes
Requisitions, quotations and approvals move by email, so nobody can say where a PO is or what is left in the budget until the month closes.
Sectors
Zoho, shaped around the factory and the back office behind it.
Zoho implementation for manufacturers — procurement and approvals, production and stores, employee portals, and integration with the ERP you are keeping.
Manufacturers rarely need a new system of record. They need the twenty processes around it to stop running on email and spreadsheets: the purchase requisition waiting in someone's inbox, the budget nobody can see until quarter end, the grievance form that is still paper.
What we hear
What manufacturing businesses arrive with.
The plant system is staying
SAP or an equivalent holds production and finance and is not being replaced. Anything new has to work alongside it rather than argue with it.
Back-office functions each have their own spreadsheet
Admin, facilities, liaison, projects and task governance all exist, all in different files, none of them auditable.
What we build
What a manufacturing platform usually contains.
Procure to pay, with the approvals built in
Purchase requisition, RFQ, purchase order, GRN and payment, with multi-level approval, quotation-compliance rules, budget tracking and mobile approval. Delivered for a manufacturing client, including PO recall and correction rather than recreation.
Production, stores and inventory on one platform
Masters, procurement, GRN, inventory, production, sales, ledger and management reporting in a single Creator application, as built for a distilling business.
Cross-functional back-office governance
For a metals manufacturer, five integrated modules covering task and KPI governance, project lifecycle with vendor and financial tracking, admin and facilities, government liaison with SLA-bound processing, and three distinct procurement flows including aluminium raw material with price fixation.
Employee-facing portals
Grievances, suggestions, tax declarations, cab requests and welfare schemes as digital forms with escalation matrices and turnaround times, as delivered for an automotive manufacturer.
Products this usually involves
Zoho CreatorZoho BooksZoho SpendZoho CRMZoho AnalyticsZoho Contracts
Proof
Work in this sector.
EMH Crane Componentsmanufacturing
Five departments, one on-premise application
Five departments running on separate tools and spreadsheets, with the data in each invisible to the others. Now one on-premise Creator application covering customer to part to project to support, hosted on their own infrastructure.
Creator
manufacturing
A procurement cycle that can be corrected, not recreated
A procurement process with no way to correct a purchase order and no live view of budget. Now PR to payment in one place, approvable from a phone, with budget utilisation visible as it happens.
Creator
manufacturing
An employee portal with escalation built in
Grievances, suggestions, tax declarations, cab requests and welfare schemes handled by email and chasing. Now digital forms with a defined escalation matrix, automatic closure rules and colour-coded ageing.
Creator
manufacturing
Production, stores and sales on one platform
Masters, procurement, GRN, inventory, production, sales, deposits and ledger each had their own process. Now one application, with real-time visibility across all of them.
Creator
manufacturing
Accounting, travel and expenses under one roof
Accounting, banking, employee records, travel and expenses each ran separately with their own approvals. Now they share one system, with standardised financial processes and controls.
BooksSpend
manufacturing
Every mould traceable, across four plants
Mould requests, job orders and vendor coordination run by email across a head office, four plants and outside vendors. Now one on-premise platform with QR tracking, checklist-driven stages and a single record synchronised with the ERP.
Creator
Questions
Asked most often in manufacturing.
Do we have to replace SAP?
No, and usually you should not. We have integrated Zoho with SAP for both expense and sales-order flows, and with Xero elsewhere. The plant system keeps doing what it does well; Zoho carries the processes around it.
Can approvals happen away from a desk?
Yes. Purchase requisition and purchase order approval through the mobile app, plus email-based approval, is something we have shipped in production.
How long does a procurement build take?
A standard rollout is typically two to four weeks. A full procure-to-pay build with multi-level approvals, budget tracking and integrations sits in the four to twenty week range, confirmed at scope sign-off.
Tell us what you need Zoho to do.
Describe the problem and we will come back with a ballpark scope and timeline.