Meet National Crate
A U.S.-based manufacturer of custom and standardized shipping crates, the kind of shop where every order is a little different. As order complexity and volume grew, spreadsheets and disconnected systems started to cap efficiency and visibility across quoting, production and the floor.
~24 employees · ~20 orders a week · Custom dimensions and builds
Four bottlenecks quietly capping the business
Nothing was on fire, but every week the same friction added up across the floor.
Manual, redundant entry
Orders went into spreadsheets first, then got re-keyed into a separate local system: double the work, double the chance of error.
Slow, expert-bound quoting
Every quote meant calculating materials, labour time and margins by hand, and it only worked if the right expert was available.
No production visibility
No way to track work-order progress, time per station or employee activity. Management was flying blind on delays.
Disorganized inventory
No structured bin locations meant staff spent real time hunting for materials across the facility, every single day.
One custom ERP, built on Zoho Creator
A single system unifying quoting, production, inventory and shipping, designed around how National Crate actually works.
Intelligent quoting engine
Calculates material requirements from crate dimensions, labour time from part data, and final pricing with configurable margins, consistent every time.
Production and work orders
QR-code work orders with real-time tracking of workstation activity, employee time logs and component-level progress across multiple jobs at once.
Inventory and bin locations
Tracks stock at the bin level, allocates materials to work orders automatically and points staff to the exact location instantly.
End-to-end workflow automation
Quote to sales order to work order to inventory to shipment to invoice: one clean flow with no duplicate entry and consistent data at every stage.
What changed once it went live
75%
Faster quoting
30–40 min → under 10 min. Faster responses and more quoting capacity, without leaning on one expert.
~0%
Order errors
~5% (1 in 20) → near zero. Automation and structured data drove accuracy up across the board.
99%
Faster material retrieval
10–20 min → under 5 sec. Real-time, bin-level visibility ended the daily hunt for materials.
0 → Full
Production visibility
Real-time tracking of work orders, workstations and activity, for data-driven decisions for the first time.
10–15 hrs
Admin time saved weekly
Standardized workflows across quoting, production and shipping cut the manual load.
Zero
Duplicate data entry
Re-keying orders across systems was eliminated: one source of truth, start to finish.
From fragmented and manual to streamlined and data-driven
A fully customized ERP turned National Crate from a patchwork of spreadsheets into a connected, data-driven operation, improving efficiency and accuracy today and laying the groundwork for bottleneck analysis and capacity planning next. It's the same playbook we'd map to your shop on a quick call.
Could this work for your floor?
Book a free 15-minute call with Aether. Walk us through how you quote and run jobs today, and you'll leave knowing whether the same fix fits your shop.
Results reflect outcomes reported for the National Crate ERP implementation. Individual results vary by shop, process and order mix.
