Why manufacturers choose ARC ERP Inventory & Warehouse
Outcomes you can measure in the first quarter.
99.5% Stock Accuracy
Barcode-driven receipts, issues & cycle counts.
Reduce Carrying Cost 20%
Reorder alerts, ABC analysis & dead-stock reports.
Full Traceability
Batch, serial & expiry from supplier to customer
Inventory is where the truth of the business lives
You can fudge a P&L. You cannot fudge a stock count. Inventory is the most physical, most observable, and most painful number in any manufacturing business — painful because it ties up cash, hides obsolescence, masks scrap, and is almost always wrong by Friday evening if it was right on Monday morning. The only way to keep inventory honest is to make it the natural, real-time consequence of every operational event: a GRN at the gate, a goods issue to the line, a job completion on the machine, a delivery challan to the customer, a return from a job worker. ARC ERP’s Stores, Inventory and Warehouse module is built around exactly that principle.
Whether you operate a single 20,000 square-foot godown in Ambattur or three plants across Chennai, Hosur and Pune with bonded warehouses, finished-goods depots and customer-VMI stores, this module gives you one consistent, real-time picture of stock — by item, by location, by batch, by serial, by ownership.
The eight transactions that make up your warehouse life
Purchase GRN
The starting gun for material entering your premises. Every shipment received from a supplier becomes a Purchase GRN, linked to the originating PO. The GRN captures item, quantity received, batch and serial details if applicable, gate-entry number, vehicle number, driver details, and any short-supply or damage. Quality inspection is triggered automatically for items flagged ‘inspect on receipt’; the inspection result determines whether material moves to accepted stock, rejection bay or quarantine. Inventory, payable, GST input credit and asset register (for capex) all update in real time.
Purchase Return
When inspection or later use reveals a defect, the Purchase Return generates a debit note, reverses inventory, prepares the return shipment, and notifies the supplier. The supplier’s quality scorecard is updated. For SEZ and bonded operations, the return respects customs and bond requirements.
Purchase Request
This is the indent screen for any department to request material from stores. If stock is available, it is issued; if not, it triggers a purchase enquiry to the buyer. Purchase Requests carry justification, required-by date, cost centre and an approval workflow. They are also the foundation of demand visibility — a CFO can see at any moment what is being requested across the company and where the bottlenecks lie.
Sales Return
Customer returns — for quality, dispatch error, or commercial reasons — flow through the Sales Return document. Material is received back into a separate quarantine area for disposition (rework, scrap, or back to stock if good). A credit note is automatically generated against the original invoice, with proper GST reversal. Customer-wise return analytics feed quality improvement plans.
Returnable Delivery Challan (Returnable DC)
Material sent out that is expected to come back — tools sent to a job worker, machinery sent out for calibration, samples for customer trials — moves on a Returnable DC. The system tracks the open quantity and ages it; if it does not return within the agreed period, alerts trigger to stores and to commercial. Job-work returnable DCs respect Section 143 of the CGST Act and the 1-year and 3-year rules for inputs and capital goods. This compliance, automated, is one of the biggest pain reliefs for tax teams in Tamil Nadu manufacturing groups.
Non-Returnable Delivery Challan (Non-Returnable DC)
Material moving without an invoice but not expected back — branch transfers, free supplies to customers, scrap dispatches, donations — uses Non-Returnable DC. Inventory and GST treatment depend on the document subtype, all configured correctly out of the box. E-way bills are generated where applicable.
Goods Receipt
This is the broader receipt document used for inter-branch transfers in, customer-supplied free issue material, returns from job workers, and any other inward movement that is not a vendor purchase. Treating these as first-class transactions — instead of journal entries — keeps inventory honest and the audit trail intact.
Goods Issue
The mirror of Goods Receipt: any outward movement that is not a customer dispatch. Issue to production, issue to maintenance, issue to job worker, branch transfer out, sample issue, scrap disposal. Each issue updates inventory and feeds cost accounting against the right cost centre.
Multi-branch warehouse architecture
Related: Sales & CRM module — ARC ERP
ARC ERP is multi-branch and multi-warehouse from day one. A single item code can exist at any number of locations; transfers between locations are tracked end-to-end with in-transit visibility, so material that has left Hosur but not yet arrived in Sriperumbudur is correctly classified — neither at the source nor at the destination, but in transit. For multi-state operations, branch transfers respect GST treatment (taxable inter-state move with IGST on stock transfer between distinct persons).
Within each warehouse, you can define bins, racks, rows and shelves to as many levels as your operation needs. Pick-paths can be optimised, FIFO and FEFO can be enforced for batch-controlled items, and serial-controlled items (electronics, valves, motors) get full birth-to-death traceability.
Batch, serial, expiry and shelf life
Pharmaceutical and food manufacturers in Chennai know the cost of a single expiry incident. ARC ERP supports batch and lot tracking with manufacture and expiry dates, FEFO picking, automated expiry alerts at configurable lead times, and quarantine of expired material. Serial tracking gives full traceability for engineered products — when a customer reports a failure, the team can pull up the exact production batch, the operator, the machine, the date, and the inspection records, in seconds.
Stock valuation and costing
Multiple valuation methods are supported — moving weighted average, FIFO, standard cost — at the item or item-group level. The CFO can see inventory value daily, broken down by category (raw material, WIP, finished goods, consumables, packing material, scrap) and by location. Slow-moving and non-moving inventory dashboards highlight obsolescence risk before it becomes a write-off. Inventory turns and days-of-cover are computed live, allowing operations and finance to converge on a working capital plan that the board can defend.
Cycle counts and physical inventory
Physical stock-takes are the most disruptive event in a warehouse calendar. ARC ERP supports continuous cycle counting — a small subset of items counted daily — that drives variance to near-zero and eliminates the annual full stock-take fire drill. Mobile-based count screens let your team count with a tablet, scan barcodes, capture variance reasons, and post adjustments through a controlled workflow. ABC classification ensures high-value items are counted more frequently than low-value ones
Multi-branch dashboard for the CXO
The flagship visualisation is the multi-branch warehouse dashboard. One screen shows total stock value across the group, broken down by branch, by category and by ageing bucket. Stock-out risks (items below safety stock), excess stock (items exceeding maximum) and aged stock (items beyond the slow-moving threshold) are visible in real time. A CXO landing in Chennai airport can open this dashboard on her phone and know exactly where her working capital is parked, before her car even reaches the office.
Reports and traceability
- Stock ledger by item, location, batch and serial.
- Stock ageing buckets configurable to your business cadence.
- Inventory valuation report aligned to your accounting policy.
- Slow, non-moving and excess inventory analysis.
- Job-work outstanding statement with statutory ageing under GST Section 143.
- Branch transfer reconciliation, in-transit and customer-VMI stock visibility.
Outcomes our customers report
- Inventory accuracy of 99.5% or better, validated by statutory audit.
- Working capital tied up in inventory reduced by 15 to 25%.
- Stock-out incidents down by more than 60%, lifting OEE and customer OTIF.
- Annual physical stock-take time cut from days to hours, sometimes eliminated entirely through cycle counting.
- Job-work compliance under GST achieved without manual ageing trackers.
Why ARC ERP for inventory and warehouse
Related: Maintenance (CMMS) module — ARC ERP
A warehouse module is judged in the small things — the speed of a GRN screen on a tablet, the clarity of a stock ledger when the auditor visits, the elegance of a multi-branch dashboard when the MD asks a question. ARC ERP, built and refined by one of the focused manufacturing ERP software development companies in Chennai, has been shaped by exactly these moments at customer sites across Tamil Nadu and India. The result is a module that quietly does its job — and lets the rest of the business focus on growing.
If your stock register and your physical stock disagree more often than they agree, it is time to upgrade. ARC ERP’s Stores, Inventory and Warehouse module is the upgrade.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers from our Chennai-based ARC ERP implementation team.
Yes. ARC ERP offers full batch, serial, expiry and lot tracking across multiple warehouses and bin locations.
Yes. Track stock across unlimited warehouses, branches and bin locations with real-time visibility and inter-branch transfers.
Yes. Goods receipt, goods issue, stock counts and dispatch all support barcode and QR-code scanning via mobile or handheld scanners.
Explore other ARC ERP manufacturing ERP modules
Financial Accounting
Multi-company books, branch P&L, e-Invoice, TDS & real-time cash visibility — engineered for Indian compliance.
Purchase & Procurement
RFQ, multi-vendor comparison, PO approvals, GRN & supplier scoring — all in one disciplined workflow.
Inventory & Warehouse
Multi-location stock, bin tracking, GRN, DC, batch & serial — accurate inventory you can finally trust.
Maintenance (CMMS)
Preventive, reactive & predictive maintenance with checklists, work orders, spares & equipment history.
