How OXON Technologies Built Its Back Office from Scratch to Avoid a "Frankenstack" of Tools
This Partner + Customer Case Study walks through how Zoho Advanced Partner Node9 built a working ERP for OXON Technologies, adding inventory tracking, batch traceability, custom manufacturing ordering, and a QA trail at a critical junction in Oxon's growth.
“I didn’t want some sort of Frankenstack. I didn’t want QuickBooks over here and something for inventory over there. I wanted a holistic solution, and I knew enough to know I wanted help.”
- INDUSTRYFuel Combustion Technology
- Key AppsZoho One: CRM, Inventory, Books, Sign, Projects, Bookings, WorkDrive
Key Results
OXON Technologies didn’t approach Node9 in hopes of fixing a bad system, it had no formal system at all. Once implemented by Dave Stauffer and Node9, Zoho gave OXON its first system of record for raw materials, manufacturing, quality assurance, and sales pipeline.
- ZERO → FULL BATCH TRACEABILITY
- ~6 MONTHS DISCOVERY TO DAILY USE
- 12 OF 14 DELIVERABLES DELIVERED
- ~50% DAILY ADOPTION
The Business Outcome for OXON Technologies
One CRM fully retired. OXON completed a clean migration off Nutshell, its prior standalone CRM, moving every contact, account, and deal into Zoho CRM.
Increased efficiencies. Zoho allowed Oxon to accomplish more with fewer resources by automating time-intensive tasks that previously required dedicated staff.
Zero to full batch traceability. Every batch now resolves back to its raw materials and their sourcing, the machine it ran on, who performed QA, when, and whether it passed — none of which OXON could do before Zoho.
Twelve of fourteen contracted deliverables delivered quickly. Both Scott and Dave put the full engagement, from first discovery conversation to a system in daily use, at about six months. The two deliverables not yet completed trace to Zoho Books—transaction email templates and Books training—remain outstanding because the internal QuickBooks migration stalled on OXON’s side.
~50% daily adoption. Roughly half of OXON’s 30 to 35 employees are active in Zoho on a given day, spanning Inventory, CRM, Sign, Bookings, and Projects — built off formal training of only one to two internal subject-matter experts.
Licenses paid for at go-live, not through the build. OXON’s Zoho contact extended the company’s free trial by roughly 60 days while Node9 developed the system, so OXON effectively began paying for software at the point it became usable.
What the Node9 Implementation Delivered
An ERP-lite built from nothing. OXON had no ERP and no inventory system of any kind. Node9 built raw-material tracking, composite items, purchase orders, vendor management, sales-order and shipping workflows, barcoding, and serial tracking inside Zoho Inventory from a blank slate.
The missing 10%, custom-built. Zoho Inventory has no native concept of a manufacturing order. Node9 built custom Manufacturing Orders, QA, and Equipment modules inside Inventory itself — prototyping the flow with Scott before committing to it — to close the gap.
A CRM configured to OXON’s actual sales motion. Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Deals aligned to discovery findings; security roles and profiles set; unused modules hidden and the interface standardized; lead-conversion stages and sales territories personalized.
Automated lead capture. A custom “Contact Us” form on OXON’s website feeds directly into Zoho CRM, alongside Gmail sync and CRM email-client plugins for the sales team.
A quoting assessment, not a quoting assumption. Node9 ran a formal CPQ review against OXON’s dosing-equipment quotes rather than defaulting to Zoho CPQ, and scoped the quoting process to what OXON actually sells.
Hazmat-aware shipping. UPS is integrated directly; because OXON ships hazardous materials, Node9 standardized manual shipment creation and package/shipment templates for the remaining carriers after a carrier integration proved unworkable.
Financial plumbing in place. Chart of accounts, price lists, transaction and email templates, tax handling, bank-statement sync, and invoice-linked online payments through Authorize.net and Stripe.
Customer and vendor self-service portals, configured and live.
A foundation for ISO 9001. The documentation trail now attached to every batch—raw materials, equipment, and a QA record that accepts supporting document attachments—is the groundwork OXON will lean on when it pursues certification, targeted for next year.
Internal capability, not dependency. Train-the-trainer sessions certified OXON’s own SMEs on CRM and Inventory, and OXON now runs and extends the system itself, calling Node9 in when it gets stuck rather than retaining it for day-to-day operation.
Zoho Customer: OXON Technologies
OXON Technologies is a fuel technology company built around a patented, molecular-level combustion additive—a proprietary micelle that forms in the fuel and releases an agent during the combustion heat cycle, causing hydrocarbons to burn more completely. The company got its start a little over a decade ago, with Scott as COO from the beginning.
OXON sells one core additive under four brand names depending on the application—Oxon Drive for over-the-road trucking, Oxon Build for construction—which differ in dosage ratio, not in how they are made. It deliberately does not sell to small operators, targeting large trucking fleets, municipal bus systems, and construction and mining operations, OXON is now building distributorships in India, the U.K., and Mexico as it prepares to scale and shrink the often months-long per-customer sales journey. The company runs with 30 to 35 employees.
The value proposition shifts by market. For a U.S. construction fleet, it is fuel economy and after-treatment relief. For a market like India, it is air quality. Scott reports the additive drops NOx—what he calls “the cancer-causing carcinogen in diesel emissions”—by about 85%, and cuts soot and particulate matter by at least 60%. OXON’s published materials cite roughly 15% lower fuel consumption and up to 21% less CO₂e, validated by independent university studies in California, Brazil, Luxembourg, and Belgium, and a 14-month pilot at New Jersey site-work contractor Petillo Inc. that returned a 10% fuel reduction, a 21% CO₂e drop, and 65% less maintenance downtime across 300-plus pieces of equipment.
Zoho Implementation Partner: Node9
Node9 is a Zoho Advanced Partner founded and led by Dave Stauffer, who became a Zoho partner almost by accident nine years ago. He started a consulting business, adopted Zoho to run it cheaply as a one-person shop, then discovered that his first customer—a company a couple of blocks down the street from him—was already on Zoho.
“I went from having no idea of what I was really doing to being a Zoho partner simply because I used the software and I had a customer to use the software.”
In the years since, Node9 has narrowed deliberately. Where it once took any project that came through the door, it now concentrates on manufacturing, distribution, and B2B sales, and its engagements tend to land clients on the full Zoho One suite for straightforward economic reasons.
“Most of our business, honestly, is in Zoho One simply because we’re usually tying together CRM and then either inventory or projects — because you’re either selling an item or you’re delivering a project. Then things like Desk for support and Analytics for reporting, and products like Zoho Sign or WorkDrive, are almost always part of it. So by that point, you might as well have Zoho One from a cost and simplicity perspective.”
Node9 sees two kinds of client: the older, larger company with an antiquated ERP that needs modern tooling bolted onto it, and the smaller or newer company that arrives with nothing at all. OXON was emphatically the second kind. Dave puts his typical implementation in the three-to-six-month range; OXON landed at the far end of it because of the manufacturing build.
The Challenge: Manufacturing on Faith, Not Data
Before Zoho, OXON would buy a large barrel of ethanol, blend in its proprietary additive, and sell the finished product in different sizes, with no reliable way to see how much raw material or finished inventory it actually had on hand at any given moment.
“They had no accurate view of inventory—quantities of raw material needed to ship product. Their process had been, manufacturing at the last second and hoping that everything was there, and with no tracking to ensure inventory was there for the next shipment.”
The traceability gap was the sharper risk. If a customer reported a problem with a batch, OXON had no way to work backward to the ethanol lot or the raw materials that went into it. As Dave put it: “If there was some type of problem, they had no idea what batch the ethanol or any of the other raw materials came from. So they couldn’t trace it back to something.” Batch records, to the extent they existed at all, lived on paper and in spreadsheets inside Google Workspace — and by Scott’s own account, some of that work simply wasn’t getting done.
The stakes were rising on both sides of the business. OXON operates in a regulated, emissions-focused industry, sources raw materials globally, and was beginning to plan for ISO 9001 certification — all of which would eventually demand consistent, documented, auditable process. Commercially, the company had started investing in sales without any way to see what that investment was producing. Dave has heard the same sentence from nearly every company he meets that lacks a CRM: “We have no idea what’s in our pipeline. We have no idea what our salespeople are working on.”
What OXON Moved Off Of
No ERP and no inventory system of any kind. Raw-material and finished-product tracking lived on paper and in spreadsheets inside Google Workspace — and batch numbers weren’t reliably tracked at all.
Nutshell, a standalone CRM with no connection to inventory, finance, or the rest of the business. Fully retired; all contact, account, and deal data migrated into Zoho CRM.
QuickBooks and Authorize.net, used for partial financial and payment tracking. Contacts and accounts were imported from both during the build; full QuickBooks retirement is still in progress.
Choosing Zoho and Node9
Scott personally worked through roughly 10 to 12 ERP platforms, NetSuite among them, before narrowing the field to Zoho. His conclusion was consistent across nearly all of them: they were built for a level of production complexity OXON doesn’t have. “Most of the platforms were for production — these big ERP platforms were way more than we needed,” he said, because OXON effectively makes one product. “As we move through our production cycle in the factory, it’s the same, and we have basically one product.”
He already knew Zoho from the CRM side and was, by his own admission, skeptical about extending it into inventory and finance. “I was quite skeptical of Zoho because I only knew it in the context of CRM,” he said. “But the further I looked into it, I got more comfortable with it.” What he was unwilling to accept was a patchwork.
What he needed the platform to do, specifically, was answer a question OXON couldn’t answer at all.
“I wanted to be able to put a batch number on the product and be able to look up that batch number and know everything about that batch — who made it, all the raw materials, where those raw materials were sourced. I wanted the whole history on that, which is what an ERP will do. But again, I didn’t need all that big functionality from some of the big ERP players.”
The second driver was ISO 9001, which OXON is targeting for next year. Certification would require documentation proving that manufacturing is consistent and repeatable every time — and Scott wanted that record in one accessible place from the outset rather than reconstructed later.
“For ISO 9001, you have to have the documentation to be able to show that your manufacturing is consistent through the process every time. And I just felt like Zoho would be a good place to house that and be able to access it.”
Zoho One’s bundle sealed it. Scott went looking for three things and found that the pricing structure included a great deal more.
“I think it met the immediate need — meaning the financial package, the inventory package and the CRM. And then looking at the pricing structure for Zoho One, there were other things within that structure that I thought would be beneficial to us… All of that is just kind of a free extra gimme, because by signing up for Zoho One, I got the three things that I needed plus everything else.”
Implementation: Discovery Before Requirements
Node9 didn’t open by asking OXON for a requirements list. The engagement began with a couple of long conversations about the business itself — what OXON made, how it made it, and how the team actually worked — before any of it got translated into a system. From there Node9 came back with rounds of follow-up questions, then produced a proposed process flow for Scott to react to.
“Dave did a good job in first understanding our business, and we talked a lot about process flow… I could tell this was a guy that’s been down this road before. He really knew the questions to ask in order to get to the bottom line.”
The cadence ran for months. Discovery included individual sessions with each team member to get their own account of what they needed, a couple of full-team planning sessions, weekly status check-ins, and CRM training for the whole team later on. Node9’s discovery format is deliberately loose—“pretty much free form,” as Dave describes it, “just talk through your business process, talk through your day in the life of what you do.” Some of what surfaced was documented. Some of it existed only in someone’s head. OXON’s single-product simplicity made the whole process faster to get through than it would have been at a company with a more diverse product line.
What the build actually covered
The contracted scope was broader than the headline apps suggest. On the CRM side, Node9 configured the company profile, set up security roles and profiles, hid unused modules and standardized the interface for usability, and aligned Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and Deals to what discovery had surfaced. It personalized lead-conversion stages and the opportunity pipeline, defined sales territories and routing, configured Gmail sync with CRM email-client plugins, and built a “Contact Us” web form that drops inbound leads straight into CRM. It also ran a formal CPQ review against OXON’s dosing-equipment quotes to determine whether Zoho CRM’s CPQ tooling was the right fit rather than assuming it was. Contacts and accounts were imported from QuickBooks and Authorize.net.
On the Inventory side, the build included vendor management and purchase orders, item definitions including composites and raw materials, sales-order and shipping workflows, package and shipment templates, barcoding, and serial tracking. UPS was integrated directly. A broader carrier integration was evaluated and abandoned — OXON ships hazardous materials, so shipments are created manually against standardized templates instead.
In parallel, Node9 was implementing Zoho Books. This required vendor and customer sync from CRM, item sync, price lists, transaction and email templates, chart of accounts, tax handling, bank-statement sync, invoice-linked online payments, and customer and vendor self-service portals. Node9 closed the engagement with train-the-trainer sessions so that one to two OXON SMEs could run reports, administer the system, and train everyone else.
On timeline, the three sources reconcile cleanly enough. Node9 signed the deal on July 2, 2025 and the SOW runs July 8 to November 18. Dave puts real kickoff around August and the whole thing at “a six month or so project until kind of all said and done.” Scott independently described the same six months, and was specific about what it covered: “That six months start to finish included adapting the CRM to our needs, and also Zoho Inventory, which is what we’re using basically as a light ERP.”
The 10% Zoho Inventory Couldn’t Do
The hardest part of the build had nothing to do with CRM. Zoho Inventory has no native concept of a manufacturing order, and OXON needed to track not just its raw materials but the production and QA process behind every batch: which machine ran the job, who performed quality assurance, and whether it passed.
“Inventory doesn’t have manufacturing orders. It did 90% of what he needed to do, but we needed it to actually track the manufacturing process and the QA process… That 10% was really important. We can track the raw materials, but we couldn’t track the manufacturing process and the QA process.”
Rather than scope it on paper and hope, Node9 built a working prototype first. “I framed out kind of a prototype,” Dave said, “custom module and custom process to show him to say, hey, this is probably what it’s going to look like, will this meet your needs?”
What got built, all of it inside Inventory rather than CRM: a sales order triggers a Manufacturing Order; the Manufacturing Order routes into a custom QA process that records who performed QA, when, and pass or fail; and a custom Equipment module tracks which specific machine the job ran on. Node9 stitched it together with workflow logic and light custom code. “Someone wants a barrel of fuel and that has to be manufactured,” Dave said. “It has to go through a QA process. We have to track who QA’d it, when that was done, did it pass, did it fail… and we have to track what equipment was it run on.”
Both men put the first version at roughly 80% right, with the usual round or two of live use closing the rest. “It almost always takes the user using it a couple of times and then giving us some feedback to get it to 100%,” Dave said. Scott’s assessment matched: “We did make changes, but we didn’t make that many. It was pretty good from the start… I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but it was so close that it was very encouraging.”
The strongest endorsement of the build is that Scott thought it came out of the box.
“It’s so seamless, I forgot that it wasn’t actually part of the product to begin with. I completely forgot that it was a custom module.”
Inventory in Practice
Zoho Inventory is the closest thing OXON has to a full ERP, and Scott is precise about the distinction. Complimented on how far the company had pushed Zoho as an ERP, he corrected the premise on the spot: “I wouldn’t call it a full functioning ERP… I call it ERP-lite.” That is the point rather than a shortfall — avoiding the weight of a full ERP platform was the reason OXON chose this path.
In practice, a sales order becomes a Manufacturing Order, which routes through custom QA and Equipment tracking against raw materials and composite items defined in Inventory, with purchase orders and vendor management upstream and barcoded, serial-tracked stock downstream. The output ships in roughly 260-gallon chemical totes at a dosage ratio of about 1-to-10,000 — so a single tote treats a very large volume of fuel, and eight totes to a container treat millions of gallons. Shipments are created manually against standardized templates because the product is classified hazardous, with UPS integrated for what it can carry.
CRM in Practice
Zoho CRM gave OXON pipeline visibility it had never had. The company’s first hires weren’t salespeople — they were regulatory consultants, and then engineers whose company OXON acquired outright to build factory and process expertise ahead of the ISO push. By the time OXON began pushing sales seriously, it was spending on a function it couldn’t measure.
That visibility matters more at OXON than at most companies, because of what the company is up against commercially. The fuel-additive market has a long history of products that don’t work, and Scott doesn’t pretend otherwise: “If you go to the EPA website and look at registered fuel additives and bring up that list, you will scroll for 10 minutes… and 95-plus percent of them do nothing. They don’t work.” Prospects are skeptical by default, so OXON has to prove the product empirically — telematics baseline a fleet’s fuel use and emissions faults for 30 to 60 days without the additive, then run three to four months with it, and some pilots go six. That is a sales cycle measured in quarters, across dozens of tracked opportunities, which is exactly the kind of pipeline that cannot be held in anyone’s head.
The roadmap for CRM follows OXON’s go-to-market structure. Its U.S. distributor is the largest Caterpillar dealer in the country, and Node9 configured specific handling around that relationship; the dealers function less as distributors than as a network of sub-salespeople pitching OXON to their own equipment customers. Today CRM usage remains concentrated with the reps who log consistently, and broadens as the sales team grows.
Books: The One Unfinished Piece
Books is the honest gap in this story, and the reason is internal rather than technical. Node9 configured it during the engagement — chart of accounts, price lists, vendor and customer sync, tax handling, templates, bank-statement sync, payments, portals. The QuickBooks migration was targeted for December and then tabled until OXON can pull the necessary resources and personnel away from pressing activities. The work is paused, funded, and waiting on bandwidth. “When we can find the minutes, we’ll be able to get that done,” said Scott.
Beyond Inventory and CRM
The Zoho One bundle turned out to include tools OXON never planned around and now uses daily. Zoho Bookings runs consultation scheduling directly off OXON’s website. Zoho Sign is in daily use. OXON’s marketing team, a more recent addition to the company, works in Zoho’s marketing automation tooling and Zoho Projects every day. A sales rep independently connected a contact-enrichment tool in the ZoomInfo category on his own initiative, which is its own quiet signal about adoption.
WorkDrive use is partial and Scott flags it as a live problem rather than a solved one: sales material and one-page marketing collateral live in WorkDrive, while other documents remain in Google Drive. “Which is problematic,” he said, “because then you’ve got to look in two different places.”
Benefits and ROI
OXON is under a year past go-live, and the returns break into four categories: labor removed, risk retired, market access protected, and cost deferred. Scott is candid that not all of them carry a clean dollar figure yet — partly because Books isn’t live, and partly because OXON built the system at the same moment it was standing up production, which leaves no clean “before” to measure against.
Reallocated resources
The entire scope of work allocated for inventory and invoicing went away, and that capacity went back to the rest of the team. The work wasn’t merely slow. Some of it wasn’t happening.
“We were doing all that by hand, you know, just with spreadsheets, and some of it wasn’t getting done at all. I had no way of tracking everything, the batch numbers and all that, prior to Zoho.”
Risk retired
Before Zoho, a field issue had no traceable path backward. Today every batch resolves to its raw materials and their sourcing, the equipment that produced it, the person who performed QA, the date, and the pass/fail result — with supporting documents attachable to the QA record itself. Scott is direct that this is the benefit hardest to price and among the most valuable: “It’s hard to put an economic benefit on that, when you have an issue in the field and you need to correct it.”
What he can point to is output quality. “Our production overall has gotten much better in terms of just the consistency of the quality,” he said. “So it’s hard to put a number on that, but it’s a definite.” For a company whose entire sales problem is proving it isn’t selling snake oil, consistency isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the product.
Market access protected
OXON has already passed the fuel-additive certification testing required to be legally added to fuel in the U.S. and in Europe, including under the European EN 590 diesel standard. Those certifications are what let OXON sell at all — and holding onto them depends on being able to demonstrate that today’s output matches what was originally submitted to the lab.
As Scott framed it: “It’s important that we have a standard process that makes sure that at any time, anything that we put out, if it is challenged or tested, that it will pass those tests again… The product you provided to that lab to get you that certification, it passed. But what about the product that’s coming out right now? What about the product that’s in my hand right now — would it pass?”
ISO 9001, targeted for next year, is the next layer on the same foundation, and Scott is precise about what it actually demands — and about which part of the Zoho build exists to satisfy it. Certification runs through a hired consultant to design the system, then a third-party auditor to verify it, with recertification roughly every two years. Scott’s description of the audit is the cleanest possible statement of why the QA module exists: “There’s a third-party auditor that comes in and says, ‘Okay, you’ve said this is how your process works. Prove it.’”
“That’s why I had David make that whole custom module on the QA — that I can take documents and attach to that record… Probably during the 9001 process, I may have to add a few things to that, but the structure is already there. In fact, I can do that now.”
That last clause is the ROI point. OXON isn’t going to build a compliance system when the audit comes. It has been accumulating the audit trail since go-live, as a byproduct of running the business.
Cost deferred, and dependency avoided
Two quieter returns. First, sequencing: OXON started on a free Zoho trial while Node9 built, and OXON’s Zoho contact extended that trial by roughly 60 days to cover the development window. “We basically started paying for it when we implemented it, or very close to that,” Scott said — so the licensing spend began when the system became useful rather than months earlier.
Second, self-sufficiency. Node9’s standard model sells ongoing consulting retainers, and OXON is a deliberate outlier in Dave’s book: “He’s a good example of someone that doesn’t really rely on us for that retainer. We have one with him, but it’s usually because he’s trying to do it himself, and then when he can’t figure it out, he comes to us to ask for help.” Train-the-trainer was scoped for one to two internal SMEs, and roughly half the company now works in the system daily off that base. A non-technical CEO runs his own ERP and calls his partner when he gets stuck.
“On the inventory side, it has streamlined that entire process… I think that it’s been very well received on the side of the personnel working on that end. So the impact’s been good.”
Where Things Stand Today
Roughly half of OXON’s 30 to 35 employees touch Zoho on a given day. Inventory is the workhorse; CRM, Sign, Bookings, and Projects round out daily use; Nutshell is fully retired. Books is the one open item — paused, not abandoned, with Node9 credits still on the books for when OXON’s internal owner has bandwidth. Node9 continues on call rather than on retainer-driven build work.
OXON’s next chapter is considerably bigger than its back office. A mobile doser that bolts to a semi-truck cab and automatically treats fuel as the tank fills rolls out within 60 days. Distributorships are forming in India, the U.K., and Mexico. The longer game is getting OXON blended directly into the fuel distribution stream — a first prototype is underway with a U.S. fuel distributor being market-forced into it by a cluster of construction-company customers, and foreign governments focused on emissions are lab-testing the product with a view to mandating it nationally. All of which runs through ISO 9001, which is why the documentation trail matters as much as it does.
The product results give some sense of the stakes. At one construction fleet running an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 pieces of equipment, telematics-tracked emissions fault codes had been running 500 to 600 a month. In the first month after implementing OXON, that dropped to about three.
And the most interesting thing on OXON’s Zoho roadmap wasn’t on anyone’s roadmap. OXON has partnered with a company whose device captures thousands of vehicle parameters multiple times per second, feeding an AI analysis platform that can isolate the additive’s impact far faster than the old baseline-then-pilot approach; the first pilot using it has launched, and is already producing results. Scott’s next ask for Dave is a customer-facing dashboard in Zoho, so customers can watch real-time cost-versus-savings data stream off their own equipment, with a link on every invoice. It solves both of OXON’s commercial problems at once: it collapses a six-month proof cycle, and it keeps proving value after the champion who signed the deal moves on.
What started as a company with no system at all — manufacturing at the last second, hoping the raw materials were there — now has full batch traceability, an auditable QA trail, and a retired legacy CRM. That’s what ERP-lite looks like at OXON: not a system swap, but a back office that didn’t exist in the summer of 2025, built to hold up under the certifications and the distribution ambitions still ahead.