Operations systems

Run the business. Not the busywork.

We build the systems that sit between the software you already pay for, so orders get entered, quotes get chased and problems surface early. Every build is made for how your company actually works. Nothing gets replaced.

Made for your operationNot a template with your logo dropped into it.
Nothing gets replacedYour ERP, CRM and accounting stay where they are.
A person still approvesAnything that spends money or leaves the building.
One price, quoted up frontFixed scope. The invoice matches the proposal.

What changes, in one picture

the mess, the layer, the work getting done
The spreadsheet CHARIDAN reads it, checks it, writes it back Orders enteredmatched, checked, confirmed Follow-ups senton time, and stopped on reply Problems surfaced earlywhile they are still cheap to fix What you have now What we build What runs from then on The spreadsheet CHARIDAN reads it, checks it, writes it back Orders enteredmatched, checked, confirmed Follow-ups senton time, stopped on reply Problems surfaced earlywhile they are cheap to fix

Right now, somebody is the integration

Most companies your size already own the right software. What they don't own is anything joining it together, so a person becomes the joint, carrying the same information from an inbox to a spreadsheet to accounting to whatever runs the operation.

The same typing, every day

Information lands in one system and gets keyed into two more. Nobody questions it, partly because it has always worked this way and partly because the person doing it has gotten very fast at it.

Things go quiet and die

A quote, an invoice, a lead, a warranty claim. Each one needed a single follow-up, and the person who would have sent it was on a roof or on a forklift.

You find out afterwards

The stockout, the overrun, the customer who quietly stopped ordering. It was all sitting in the data first. Nobody was watching, because nobody had built anything to watch it with.

Two kinds of company, one shape of problem

We work mostly with these two. Different weeks, same failure: the information exists, and a person is the only thing moving it.

Importers and wholesale distributors

What you have and what you're owed live in different systems

  • The same SKU gets ordered twice because the units already on the water were never subtracted
  • Purchasing runs off an export that was three days stale before anyone opened it
  • Container status gets reconstructed by searching email, one shipment at a time
  • Landed cost hasn't been recomputed since freight moved, so something is selling below cost
  • Dealer orders arrive as PDFs and photographs and get retyped by hand
  • The one person who knows the catalog is the bottleneck, and today they're on a plane

Usually $2M to $25M, owner-operated, selling through several channels at once.

Home services

The job is won or lost in the ten minutes after the phone rings

  • Half the calls ring out, and the voicemail gets returned after they've already signed with someone else
  • Estimates go out and never get chased, so priced work quietly evaporates
  • No-shows surface at eight in the morning with a crew already in the truck
  • Change orders happen verbally on site and turn into an argument at final invoice
  • Crews start the day with a round of phone calls about where to go and what to bring
  • Great work nobody can find online, because the review ask came three weeks late

Remodeling, roofing, landscaping, restoration, inspection. Anywhere a truck goes to a house.

What it looks like once it's running

Work moving through on its own, with the handful of things that genuinely need a person pulled out and put in front of you.

A Tuesday afternoon, running on its own

Live
Handled today
0
Waiting on a person
0
Hours given back this week
0
Caught before it cost you
0

Doing nothing isn't free

You already pay for these problems every year. You just pay in hours and lost work instead of in one invoice. Two examples, at the sizes we usually see.

An importer, retyping and chasing

Order entry by hand, invoices chased when someone remembers, and a morning a week building the report.

Every year, by hand$28,000
Building it onceabout $6,000
Pays for itself in under three months, then keeps going.

A contractor, losing the fast ones

Missed calls, estimates that never get a second touch, and no-shows that idle a crew.

Every year, by hand$48,000
Building it onceabout $6,500
Pays for itself in about six weeks, then keeps going.

Both figures assume a loaded cost of $32 an hour plus what typically gets lost to slow or missed work. Yours will be different. We use your real numbers in the audit, and the estimator will do the arithmetic on your own answers.

Every build is custom. These are the patterns we start from

Nobody gets one of these off a shelf. They're the shapes we've built before, and yours will end up somewhere between two of them and nothing like either.

How a project runs

You see working software in the first week rather than a status update in the fourth.

1
Fifteen minutes

A short call

What you sell, where, and which part of the week eats the most hours. If we're not a fit we say so on the call instead of sending a proposal you'd have to decline.

2
About 45 minutes, free

The audit

We map how the work moves today with you and whoever actually does it, then hand you a written plan and a fixed number. You keep the plan whether or not you hire us, including the parts you could do yourself.

3
Week one

Your real data, moving

We connect the sources and show you your own live data running through by Friday. If it isn't there, you stop and owe nothing further. This is the week most projects die elsewhere.

4
Weeks two and three

Build, then go live

It does the job on real inputs while you review every output, then approval settings get tuned to your comfort level, your team gets trained, and the documentation is handed over.

How we take the risk off you

You can walk in week one

If your real data isn't flowing through the system by the end of the first week, you stop there, owe nothing further, and keep the map and everything built so far.

Written acceptance criteria

Before anyone starts, the scope says exactly what working means, in terms you can test. So "it works" is never a matter of opinion, in either direction.

Everything in your accounts

Your database, your hosting, your billing, with us on an admin seat. You own the code and the data, and you're never locked to us to keep the lights on.

Who you'd actually be working with

Charidan is two people. It came out of work done inside an importing and distribution business: purchasing, product data, sales channels, reporting, and the daily reality of an operation held together by exports and spreadsheets. Not from a consulting deck about digital transformation.

That's what shows up in the work. We know what a purchasing manager does on a Monday, why an ERP can't represent half of what a business really does, and which spreadsheet on which laptop is quietly load-bearing. We're based in Michigan and we work with clients wherever they are, taking a small number of projects at a time so you're always talking to the person building your system.

Tell us what's slowing the operation down

Two minutes in the estimator gets you a real range. A short call and a free audit gets you a fixed number you can hold us to, and a written plan you keep either way.

hello@charidan.com