How a Building Materials Team Fixed Its Sales-to-Ops Gap

A regional building materials company processes roughly 5,600 formulas per year, with sample value running around $500K at any given time. That volume alone makes the path from sales conversation to operational execution one of the most consequential workflows in the business. And for years, it was held together with spreadsheets, email threads, and manual handoffs that forced every person, regardless of role, through the same intake path.

Sales reps in the field would collect customer requirements and then re-enter them into a system that was never designed for mobile use. Operations staff, working from a different set of priorities entirely, would receive those submissions with missing fields, inconsistent formatting, and no clear ownership signal. Admin teams spent their time translating between the two, manually tracking request status, and fielding interruption after interruption from people who just wanted to know where things stood. Every handoff introduced another opportunity for data to degrade, and every correction loop added time nobody had.

The business impact was predictable. Turnaround from customer conversation to operational action slowed down. Rework increased because data quality issues were caught late (or not at all). Coordination overhead grew, and the team’s confidence that the process could hold at scale started to erode.

They had tried to improve things before. Incremental patches to the existing system. Spreadsheet workarounds layered on top of email chains. Attempts at process discipline, asking people to be more careful and more consistent with data entry. None of it stuck, because the underlying architecture still funneled every role through the same flow and preserved the manual handoffs that created problems in the first place. You can ask people to work harder inside a constrained system, but at some point the constraint is the system itself.

The technical reality behind the problem is worth understanding. Information was being entered once by a sales rep, then re-entered by an admin, then re-entered again (sometimes partially, sometimes incorrectly) by an operations team member. Each re-entry point was an opportunity for drift, and nothing was catching errors early. Status tracking was manual, so the only way to know where a request stood was to ask someone directly. And because the company had no unified identity system connected to the workflow, access control was its own administrative headache, with separate credentials and inconsistent permissions across tools.

Fixation treated the whole problem as one connected transformation rather than picking off features one at a time. The work started with understanding how each role actually moved through the process, what information they needed, when they needed it, and where the pain concentrated. That domain learning mattered, because it meant the resulting system was shaped by real workflow patterns rather than abstract requirements documents.

The first and most visible change was splitting the one-size-fits-all interface into role-appropriate experiences. Sales, admin, and operations each got a view aligned with their actual job. Sales reps got mobile-first capture, meaning they could collect and submit complete data during a live customer conversation instead of scribbling notes and entering them later. Operations got lifecycle visibility, with clear status progression and ownership from intake through fulfillment, which eliminated most of the “where does this stand?” interruptions.

Underneath those role-specific surfaces, the system was designed so that data is captured once, validated as early as possible, and reused throughout the rest of the process. Structured checks at submission time catch errors and incompatibilities before they move downstream, which is the kind of architectural decision that pays off quietly every day. Shipping and fulfillment handoff support meant that the same data used at intake could generate the outputs needed at execution time, without anyone retyping it into yet another spreadsheet.

The whole system connected to the company’s existing corporate identity through Entra ID, which gave them single sign-on, role-aware access control, and no new credential management burden for IT. That sounds like a small detail, but in practice it removed a real source of daily friction (and a common reason teams resist adopting new internal tools).

From kickoff to complete business transformation, the project took approximately 100 days. That pace came from Fixation’s approach of shipping working software incrementally, with weekly demos that kept the client involved in every design decision rather than waiting months for a reveal.

The shift is tangible. Sales-to-operations handoffs happen faster because the data arrives complete and validated. Rework dropped because the system catches mistakes early, before they become someone else’s problem. Coordination overhead fell because status is visible to anyone with the right role, instead of being locked in someone’s head or inbox. For a team processing 5,600 formulas a year with half a million dollars in sample value moving through the pipeline at any given time, those improvements compound quickly.

Client feedback pointed to something less quantifiable but equally important: day-to-day reliability. The process now behaves the same way every time, regardless of who initiates a request or how busy the team is. That kind of consistency is hard to build and easy to undervalue, until you remember what it felt like without it.