CASE STUDY · ENTERPRISE / RMG INDUSTRY5 min read

How we replaced spreadsheets and paper trails with a full ERP for a Dhaka garments manufacturer

A garments production house was running its entire operation on WhatsApp, Excel, and manual registers. We replaced it all with a purpose-built ERP system in 5 months.

Industry

RMG / Garments

Timeline

5 Months

My Role

Lead Architect & Developer

Modules

7 Core Modules

THE PROBLEM

An entire factory running on WhatsApp and Excel

A mid-sized garments production house in Dhaka was managing production orders, inventory, HR, procurement, and client deliveries across a mix of WhatsApp groups, Excel files, and physical registers. The consequences were severe.

Production managers had no live visibility into which orders were on track. Inventory team would discover fabric shortages only when cutting had already started. HR ran attendance on paper, payroll on Excel, and calculations took three days every month. Procurement had no approval workflow — purchases were made verbally, receipts were lost.

When orders shipped late, nobody could trace why. When fabric was wasted, nobody knew how much. The business was growing but the operations were held together by individual effort and memory — not systems.

→No single source of truth for production status

→Inventory tracking was reactive, not proactive

→Payroll took 3 days manually every month

→No procurement approval chain — zero accountability

→Client delivery reporting was done manually per order

→Management had no real-time visibility into anything

THE SOLUTION

A 7-module ERP built for how garments factories actually work

We spent the first three weeks doing deep discovery — sitting with production managers, store keepers, HR officers, and the MD to understand every workflow before writing a single line of code.

The result was a custom ERP with 7 tightly integrated modules, each solving a specific pain point while sharing a single database so data flows automatically between departments.

Module 1 — Production Management: order entry, style breakdown, line assignment, daily input, tracking dashboard

Module 2 — Inventory & Store: raw material entry, issue tracking, consumption vs plan, shortage alerts

Module 3 — HR & Attendance: biometric integration, leave management, overtime tracking

Module 4 — Payroll: automated salary calculation — 3 days reduced to under 2 hours

Module 5 — Procurement: requisition → approval → PO → GRN → payment tracking

Module 6 — Client & Delivery: order-to-shipment tracking, packing list, client status reports

Module 7 — Management Dashboard: live KPIs across all modules in one executive view

TECHNICAL HIGHLIGHTS

Why we built it this way

Role-based access per department

Factory workers, line supervisors, store managers, HR officers, procurement heads, and the MD all have completely different views of the same system. We built a granular permission system where each role sees only what it needs — reducing errors and protecting sensitive data like payroll.

Offline-tolerant data entry

Factory floors in Bangladesh have unreliable internet. We built daily production input to work with optimistic UI — data is entered locally and synced when connectivity returns, so a dropped connection never loses a day's production records.

Biometric integration via local API

The factory used a ZKTeco biometric device for attendance. We built a local agent that reads attendance logs from the device every 15 minutes and pushes them to the ERP — eliminating manual attendance entry entirely.

Report generation at scale

Management reports covering months of production data needed to generate in under 5 seconds. We implemented background job processing with Redis queues — heavy reports are generated async and delivered via notification when ready, so no user ever waits on a loading screen.

THE RESULTS

Live, growing, and trusted

Payroll processing time reduced from 3 days to under 2 hours

Real-time production visibility across all factory lines

Zero manual attendance entry — fully biometric

Procurement approval workflow — every purchase accountable

Inventory shortage alerts prevent mid-production disruptions

MD has live KPI dashboard — no more end-of-week reports

7 modules delivered within 5-month timeline

TECH STACK

LaravelVue.jsPostgreSQLRedisDockerLaravel QueuesZKTeco APIRole-based Access ControlPDF GenerationExcel ExportREST APINginxUbuntu Server

“Before this system, I spent my entire Monday chasing updates from department heads. Now I open the dashboard and everything is there. The payroll module alone saved us more than the cost of the whole project.”

Managing Director

Dhaka-based Garments Manufacturer (name withheld)

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