A mill runs on one order, entered five times.

Where the order lives now

A general-purpose CRM holds the customer, the deal and the close date. It was built for companies that sell software, and it stops at the sale.

Everything after the sale goes somewhere else. The configuration and the price go into a spreadsheet. The invoice goes into the accounting package. The production steps go onto a sheet of paper, printed and carried across the building to the production manager, who has no account in the CRM because accounts are priced per person.

Each tool holds part of the order. None of them knows about the others.

What that costs

A missed shipment announces itself. A customer calls.

An order discounted past cost announces nothing. It is quoted, confirmed, scheduled, built, loaded, and invoiced. Every document is correct at every step. The margin was gone before the first cut, and the paperwork will never say so.

The cost is not the subscriptions. It is entering the same order five times, and the things that fall between.

What Bison Sawmill does

Bison Sawmill holds the whole order in one record: the quote, the ticket, the shipment and the invoice. The quote generates the production ticket, so the steps come from what was sold.

It works in the mill’s units. A customer asks in square feet. The shop builds in lineal feet, and the coverage width between them is not the nominal width. Bison Sawmill does that conversion and shows its working on the line.

Everyone who touches an order has an account, because the price is per mill and not per person. Sales can see where an order is without walking to the shop floor. Production has the ticket without waiting for a printout.

Sales sees the pipeline and not the cost. Production sees the ticket and not the price. The system enforces that, rather than asking anyone to look away from something on their own screen.

Bison Sawmill is designed against real paperwork in an operating mill, not from a specification or a feature list.

Where it stops

Bison Sawmill does not keep your books. That is permanent, not a stage the product is passing through. The accounting system was not the thing that needed replacing.

It is not for mills selling from a fixed catalog with no configuration, mills with no production step between order and shipment, or mills already committed to an ERP.