A small-batch specialty food manufacturer — soy sauce and related goods, roughly 150 SKUs — was running production and inventory largely by hand and through QuickBooks. Leadership wanted end-to-end visibility: product tracked from raw material through each production stage to the customer, with real insight into how much sat where.
Two views of the same business had to be reconciled. Leadership wanted broad farm-to-customer traceability and planning visibility. Finance and warehouse operations were already handling much of the day to day inside QuickBooks. So the question stopped being "what should we build" and became build versus buy: a purpose-built platform, or extending the tools they already ran.
Stakeholder discovery across leadership, finance and warehouse operations, surfacing exactly where the two visions diverged. Then a requirements set of more than thirty user stories: scan-based receiving and outbound, configurable production workflows, recipe management with automatic material deduction, batch measurement and observation logging, yield variance tracking, warehouse location management, and role-based access for admins, managers and floor staff.
We designed the order and fulfillment layer to replace an email-based workflow — structured order intake, multi-channel pricing validation, bill of lading generation, pick and pack lists, and co-packer delay alerting.
QuickBooks for accounting sync, Shopify over webhooks, and Faire via scheduled polling — Faire offers no outbound webhooks — all feeding a single order queue with safeguards against duplicate imports.
Discovery showed QuickBooks already covered much of what leadership wanted. So we said so, and put the lower-cost path on the table instead of pushing the larger build.
We still recommended the custom route for the full traceability vision — but laid out both options plainly, with their real tradeoffs and recurring costs, so the client could decide. We would rather give honest advice than sell the biggest possible project.