Why We Built OEMup

I want to start with a confession: OEMup did not begin with a product idea. It began with a lot of confusion in a small auto-component factory in Naroda, watching three people manage the same shipment in three different systems and getting three different answers about whether it had left the gate.

The factory belonged to a friend's father. I was visiting because the family was thinking of buying ERP software, and I had a software background, so I was the one expected to "have an opinion". The salesman that morning was very confident and very expensive. The factory was very profitable but very disorganised. And nobody in the room — not the salesman, not the family, not me — could really agree on what problem the software was supposed to solve.

What I left with that day wasn't a product idea. It was a question: why is software for Indian SMEs either too small for the factory, or too big for the budget?

Two Years on the Floor, Not in the Office

Before we wrote a line of code, my co-founders and I made a deliberate choice. We would not start by building a product. We would start by listening. For nearly two years we visited factories — auto-components in Pune and Rajkot, plastics in Vadodara, pumps and motors in Coimbatore, fabrication and tool rooms in Ludhiana, food processing in Indore.

We did not bring a pitch deck. We brought a notebook and the same three questions: What does your day look like? What software do you use? Where does the day fall apart?

The answers we heard back were remarkably consistent. Almost every owner ran the same stack: Tally for accounts, an ageing biometric machine for attendance, a WhatsApp group with the production supervisor for shop-floor updates, and Excel — vast amounts of Excel — for everything in between. The Excel was where the BOM lived. The Excel was where the job-work challans lived. The Excel was where the actual production schedule lived.

"We have software. We just don't trust the numbers in the software. The real numbers are on the supervisor's WhatsApp." — Plant head, 65-employee plastic moulding factory, Vadodara

That sentence stuck with us. The problem wasn't the absence of software. The problem was the gap between what the software thought was happening and what was actually happening on the floor. Decades of hard-working factory teams had built parallel ground-truth systems in Excel and on WhatsApp because the software they paid for didn't match the way they actually worked.

What We Heard Again and Again

Five things came up so often that we started naming them:

1. "Tally is for my CA, not for my factory." Owners loved Tally for accounts and trusted their CA to run it. They also accepted, as a fact of life, that Tally could not tell them where order 4218 was on the floor right now. Two systems. Two truths.

2. "Job-work is killing us at GST audits." Section 4(5)(a) job-work was almost universally tracked in Excel, sometimes badly. ITC-04 reconciliation was a quarterly emergency. Several owners had paid penalties not because they were dishonest, but because their tracking was bad.

3. "My salesman can't quote on the road." The owners who had the worst conversion were the ones whose teams couldn't send a quotation from a phone. The competitor who quoted on WhatsApp from the parking lot was winning the deal.

4. "We're paying twice for HR." Tally for accounts. A separate biometric vendor for attendance. A separate Excel for payroll. Three systems, one workforce, three opportunities for the numbers to disagree.

5. "Enterprise software wasn't made for me." Several owners had been quoted ₹40 lakh or more for SAP/Oracle implementations. They walked away. Not because they couldn't afford it — but because the value didn't match. They were being sold the wrong shape of product.

What We Decided Not to Build

It is tempting, when you have a list of complaints, to build software that addresses each one with a checkbox. We did not want to do that. The interesting question wasn't "what features should we add to Tally?" — it was "what is the actual model of an Indian factory, and what software shape fits it?"

We decided early on what OEMup would not be:

• Not enterprise. We weren't going to build for 5,000-person factories. The Indian SME — 5 to 250 users — is the canvas.
• Not a Tally clone. Tally is excellent at what it does. We didn't want to compete on speed of voucher entry — we wanted to compete on whether the factory could run on the system.
• Not stitched. Inventory plus Books plus People plus Creator plus integration plus prayer is not a product, it is a lifestyle. We would build one product or none.
• Not English-only on the shop floor. The supervisor will use the app or won't. If the app talks to him in fluent floor-Hindi and lets him scan a barcode, he will use it.

What OEMup would be: one product, cloud-native, manufacturer-shaped, India-first on compliance, mobile on the floor, and priced for SMEs.

Day One of Code

We started writing software in the second half of 2023. The first thing we built wasn't accounting. It wasn't even inventory. It was the production data model — BOM, routing, work order, operation, WIP — because that was the part nobody else had got right for the factories we'd been walking through.

Then the rest of the system grew around that core: accounting that auto-posts from production transactions; HRMS that posts payroll into the same accounts; e-invoice and e-way bill that just work because they are part of the platform, not an add-on. By the time the first paying customer went live, the system already had the right backbone for them not to outgrow it in the second year.

Where We Are Today

OEMup is now running in over 500 factories across India. The customers we are most proud of are not the showcase ones — they are the ones who switched from a stack of Tally + Excel + WhatsApp + biometric to OEMup, and who now genuinely close the month in a single afternoon instead of four days.

We are still small. We are still based in Ahmedabad. We are still talking to factory owners every week — not as research subjects but as customers and friends. The product is far from finished. But the bet behind it has held: build for the Indian factory's actual model, not for a translated version of someone else's model.

What's Next

Three things we're working on this year:

1. Hindi-language UI for shop-floor users (English stays for accounting / management).
2. Industry-specific templates for auto-components, plastics, fabrication, pumps, food processing — each with a default chart of accounts, item taxonomy, and BOM templates that match how that industry actually works.
3. Open API + integration partners for Razorpay, Shiprocket, GSTN, and the major banks. The job is for OEMup to be the source of truth — not to be your only software.

If you're a factory owner reading this, I'd love to hear from you — even if you don't end up using OEMup. ayush@kiraintrilogy.com is my real address. The conversations from those early visits are still the most valuable thing we've done. They're how the product got its shape, and they're how it will keep getting better.

Related reading: OEMup vs Tally · Best Tally alternatives · 5 things Tally cannot do · About OEMup & Kira Intrilogy