The Challenge

Before Zenatta, Flavor Paper did not have a solid ERP foundation. Orders, financial reporting, production, customer management, and warehousing were handled in separate tools that did not communicate with each other. The result was constant manual entry, slower productivity across departments, and inconsistent communication both internally and with clients.

“Prior to Zenatta, we lacked a solid ERP system and were using many different programs that didn’t connect with each other, creating a lot of manual entry work.” – Annie Raso, Estimator, Flavor Paper

Why It Mattered

Flavor Paper’s product catalog and sales scenarios are nuanced, with custom orders, multiple fulfillment paths, specialty licensors, and production phases that require clear handoffs. Without a unified system, teams spent too much time chasing project status, reconciling payments, and tracking production and shipping progress. A connected platform was essential to scale operations, tighten communication, and enable reporting that could guide better decisions.

The Zenatta Solution

After Flavor Paper’s Zoho Premium onboarding ended, Zenatta stepped in to design and implement a connected ERP experience across Zoho CRM, Inventory, Books, Creator, WorkDrive, Survey, and Flow. The focus was end-to-end automation, reliable order status tracking, and streamlined client communications.

• Inventory-driven production automation: The system centered on Zoho Inventory and automated progression through deal stages and product phases. When Sales Orders were processed, automation created and updated connected records to reduce duplicate entry and ensure every team worked from the same operational truth.
• CRM to Books document generation: Zenatta implemented and refined automation to generate and manage Sales Orders, Invoices, Packages, and Purchase Orders through Zoho Books, minimizing manual creation and reducing errors. Additional safeguards helped prevent duplicate shipment emails and reprocessing of fully shipped deals.
• Creator-based Purchase Order workflows: Zenatta built and iterated a Zoho Creator Purchase Order experience that prepopulated PO data from CRM Deals and supported updates back into the system. Enhancements included improved scripting, subform reliability, and better handling of edge cases across different item types.
• Shipping and tracking reliability with Flow: A shipment notification system was refined in Zoho Flow to write tracking numbers back to CRM subforms, prevent duplicate notifications, and ensure packages from multiple shipping providers were correctly marked shipped.
• Client-friendly custom order approvals: For custom orders, Zenatta created a client-facing confirmation process using Zoho Survey, paired with unique URLs and webhooks that wrote approvals and requested changes back into CRM and Inventory. Supporting files and proofs were organized in Zoho WorkDrive so teams could reference the latest client-approved assets.
• Markup and compliance controls: Zenatta introduced rules for special licensors, including layout rules and required confirmations when certain conditions were met, helping ensure margin protection and consistent internal checks.
• Reporting readiness and branded communications: As operations consolidated into one platform, Flavor Paper gained the ability to standardize branding across client communications and generate meaningful reports to support data-driven decisions.

“After getting set up, we were paired with developers who were amazing at quickly understanding our needs and coming up with creative solutions, while also being sensitive to our multi-faceted company and nuanced products.” – Annie Raso, Estimator, Flavor Paper

Results

Flavor Paper went live with their custom system in roughly four months, then continued iterating to handle real-world sales scenarios and edge cases. Within the first several months of usage, operational improvements were clear:

• Major reduction in internal and customer status check-ins due to better automation and visibility.
• Smoother production operations through standardized workflows and fewer handoff breakdowns.
• More consistent, branded customer communications across order and fulfillment milestones.
• Improved ability to pull reports and make decisions using reliable system data.

“These guys are experts. Partnering with Zenatta was an extremely worthwhile investment that allowed us to quickly build out and onboard ourselves to a custom system. Their rates and support packages are extremely reasonable, and being able to go live within four months of meeting the team was very impressive. They are true professionals that really know the possibilities and limits of this platform, and are great listeners who are always thinking of creative ways to realize our (sometimes crazy) ideas.”

– Annie Raso, Estimator, Flavor Paper