// the brief
"Close month-end in under a week. Pass the next excise audit clean. Don't break our hand-built distillation dashboards."
Saraswat had built up a labyrinth of Excel, a Tally instance and an in-house Java tool the last consultant disappeared with. The 2023 audit found ₹4.1L of unreconciled bonded-warehouse variance. The CFO needed a working system, not a 12-month transformation.
// week 0 — what we found
- 9 spreadsheets, 4 of them out of sync — and the shift in-charge knew which was "actually right."
- RG-1 was being maintained twice: once for excise, once for management. Variance: ₹4.1L.
- OMC tanker despatch involved a printout, a phone call to the gate, and a hand-written exit pass.
- The owners didn't know real per-litre cost. They knew margin, and worked backwards.
// what we built
Trustbit Ethanol Suite, configured for a 240 KLPD molasses-to-ENA flow with bonded warehouse, OMC despatch and a CO₂ recovery line. Weighbridge wired in. Hand-built distillation dashboards kept — we read from the same Modbus bus the operators were already used to.
| Module | What it replaced | Live |
|---|---|---|
| m_03 · production | Hand-written fermenter & distillation log books | Week 6 |
| m_06 · despatch | Printed tanker exit pass + phone call to gate | Week 7 |
| m_07 · excise | Duplicate RG-1 + Tally reconciliation | Week 9 |
| m_09 · insights | Owner-only Excel dashboard with three days latency | Week 11 |
// the close, twelve months later
First month-end closed in 4 working days. By month 6, the team closed in 2. The 2024 excise audit found zero variance. CO₂ revenue, previously buried, became a ₹38L/yr P&L line.
"We'd survived three ERPs that promised the world and broke at month-end. Trustbit walked the floor with our shift in-charge and built the thing around our actual registers. First month-end after go-live closed in two days."— R. Phadnis, Plant Head · Saraswat Distillers