Operations CRM for a Mid-Market Manufacturer

Overview

A $20–30M/year manufacturing company ran their operations on fragmented spreadsheets, email chains, and a generic CRM that didn't understand their business. Orders fell through handoffs, production status was invisible to sales, and leadership had no single view. o1 Innovate designed and built a unified operations CRM that replaced the patchwork and added AI where it meaningfully reduced manual work.

The problem

The company's operations depended on tribal knowledge and manual handoffs across sales, production, and fulfillment. Order status lived in someone's inbox. Production changes weren't propagated to the sales team. Leadership couldn't see the real pipeline without a Monday-morning meeting. Attempts to adopt generic CRMs had failed because the workflow was specific to their business.

What we built

• Mapped the actual operational workflow end-to-end before writing any code — orders, production jobs, materials, fulfillment, customer communication.
• Built a custom operations CRM on Next.js + Supabase, modeled around orders and production jobs rather than generic 'deals'.
• Integrated the CRM with existing tools where it made sense (accounting, shipping) and replaced them where the generic tools were the bottleneck.
• Added AI-assisted workflows for routine decisions: auto-classifying inbound order changes, drafting status update emails, flagging exceptions in production data.
• Shipped a working v1 in weeks, then iterated against real usage — each sprint targeting the highest-friction parts of the daily workflow.

Outcomes

• One source of truth for every order, production job, and fulfillment event.
• Sales and production no longer depend on email chains to stay in sync.
• Leadership has a real-time operational dashboard without Monday-morning meetings.
• AI-assisted classification and drafting reduce routine administrative overhead.