A large B2B food-ingredient maker — three factories, pan-India and international clients — ran its sales, R&D and dispatch on spreadsheets, WhatsApp and constant follow-up. Its most valuable asset, its recipes, sat in a physical drawer. I started with a full discovery, then built one connected system to run the business on.
This was a substantial manufacturer — a B2B food-ingredient business with three factories, five locations, more than two hundred staff, and customers across India and abroad. Real scale, real complexity, real money moving through it.
And almost all of it ran on Excel, Word, WhatsApp, email and phone calls. Every order moved through the business by someone chasing someone else — a sales manager calling the factory to ask whether a sample had shipped, calling again for a price, calling a third time for a payment status. The work got done through sheer personal effort and memory. The strain showed up in three places in particular.
Leads, samples, feedback, quotations and orders lived across scattered files and individual people. When something needed checking, you asked a person — and hoped they were reachable.
Sales had no real-time view of pricing, dispatch dates, or payment status, so they followed up by phone and WhatsApp, again and again. R&D and sales coordinated indirectly, slowing every sample cycle.
The whole operation leaned on a handful of key individuals holding it in their heads. There was no version control on recipes, quotes or feedback — and no reliable way to trace which internal recipe became which customer product.
For a food-ingredient maker, the recipes are the business. Yet they lived in people's laptops, in open Excel files on a shared drive, and — for the most sensitive ones — as physical copies in a locked drawer, issued to production by hand. No access control, no audit trail, no version history, and an internal-to-external coding system so tangled that no one could reliably say which lab recipe had become which product on a customer's shelf. The single most valuable thing the company owned was also the least systematically secured.
The temptation with a business this tangled is to walk in and name a platform on day one. I did the opposite — I started by understanding the work.
Before recommending anything, I ran a full discovery: structured interviews across sales, R&D, operations, production, dispatch and management, and detailed mapping of how a lead actually becomes a sample, a quotation, an order and a dispatch. Only once the real process — and its real breakages — were on paper did the right system become obvious. A proof-of-concept built during discovery let everyone see the better workflow before a rupee was committed to the full build.
The judgment that mattered most was about shape, not brand. This business didn't need one monolithic platform that tried to do everything badly. It needed a central brain for the operation, a dedicated engine for sales, and a secure, structured home for documents and recipes — each chosen for what it does best, and connected so they behave as one system.
So the decision was: ERPNext as the operational core, Zoho CRM for the sales lifecycle, and SharePoint for secure document and recipe management — integrated, not siloed. And critically, to treat the recipes as the crown jewels they are: secured, versioned, access-controlled, and traceable end to end. Build on capable, proven platforms; reserve custom work for the genuine gaps — like the recipe-code mapping no off-the-shelf tool would solve.
A central operational brain, a sales engine, and a secure document and recipe vault — each doing what it does best, all connected, with intelligence sitting on top.
An operational core, a sales engine, and a secure document-and-recipe vault — chosen for what each does best, and wired together so the business runs as one.
A capable open-source ERP at the centre, connecting what used to be scattered across files and people.
A dedicated home for the sales lifecycle, so the team sells instead of chases.
A structured, access-controlled home for documents — and for the recipes that are the company's crown jewels.
With the data finally connected, leadership got the visibility the business never had.
A business that used to move at the speed of follow-up now runs on a system its people can see into — with its most valuable asset finally protected like one.
How this one started. Unlike a quick fix, this began with a structured discovery — interviews across every department and a full map of how work really flowed — plus a working proof-of-concept built before the main implementation. That groundwork is why the system fit the business instead of the other way around. It's the diagnose-first approach, applied at the scale of a ₹100 Cr operation.
If your team spends its day chasing status, and your most valuable information isn't properly secured, that's the conversation worth having. Tell me what's breaking.