A high-volume custom-box manufacturer replaced HubSpot, Xero and a scattering of spreadsheets with one Odoo backbone — quoting, manufacturing, sales channels and finance now move together.
Faster custom-quote turnaround
Reduction in monthly-close days
Modules unified on one stack
Reduction in late deliveries
01 / Background
Cratewell Packaging Works produces postage boxes, printed mailing cartons and bespoke corrugated packaging for D2C brands across the UK. As volume grew, their workflow — HubSpot for sales, Xero for finance, Smartsheet for production, email for everything else — started losing orders between the cracks. They needed one operating system that could quote a custom carton, route it to the right machine, and close the books without re-keying.
02 / Challenges
Sales lived in HubSpot, finance in Xero, production in Smartsheet — every order was rebuilt three times by hand.
Bespoke carton quotes required manual costing across material, die-cut, print and finishing — turnaround averaged two days, costing deals.
Email campaigns ran outside the CRM, so the sales team never saw which prospects had engaged or unsubscribed.
Floor supervisors couldn't see queue load by machine, leading to over-promising on lead times during peak weeks.
Equipment maintenance was logged in notebooks — recurring issues never made it back to engineering.
03 / Solutions
Replaced HubSpot, Xero and Smartsheet with Odoo.sh Enterprise running CRM, Sales, Accounting, Project, Manufacturing, Purchase, Inventory, Marketing Automation, Helpdesk, Fleet, Maintenance and Sign on a single database.
Built a guided quoting tool on top of Odoo Sales — dimensions, flute, print colours and finishing options drive an automatic price-list rule, dropping a signed quote into the customer's inbox in minutes.
Modelled work centres for die-cut, print and gluing with realistic setup/cycle times; MRP now plans by real shop capacity, not a wish-list.
Email Marketing, Marketing Automation and Social Marketing all write back to the lead — sales sees engagement on the same screen as the deal.
Maintenance, Fleet and Expenses configured for the delivery vans and shop-floor equipment — recurring tickets feed engineering's improvement backlog.
Multi-VAT invoicing, automated bank-statement import and aged-receivable reminders — monthly close cut from 9 working days to 3.
04 / Stack & apps
05 / Outcomes
Customer, order, production, invoice and ticket all live in one Odoo record — the team stopped chasing themselves.
Configurator quoting and integrated invoicing collapsed the cycle from two weeks to under a week on standard formats.
MRP planning against real capacity ended over-promised lead times and the weekend overtime that came with them.
Automated reminders and reconciliation cut DSO and made the monthly close a non-event.
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