A CRM for manufacturing tracks an order from the first enquiry to shipment: who the customer is, what they ordered, at what price, what stage the product is at and when it will ship. The sales manager sees the order status in the system instead of phoning the shop floor, and the shop floor sees what needs to be made and by when. Sales and production work from a single order record rather than from spreadsheets and message threads.
Below we look at where orders get lost without a CRM, the path they take through the system, and when an off-the-shelf CRM is enough and when you need a custom one.
Where orders get lost without a CRM
While there are only a few orders, people keep them in their heads, in Excel and in Telegram. Then orders start getting lost — usually in the same places:
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Enquiries come in through different channels. Email, calls, Telegram, WhatsApp — each sales manager has their own. A manager falls ill, and their customers are left waiting.
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Costings live in personal files. Only the person who prepared the quote knows which version went to the customer.
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Changes are agreed verbally. The customer asked for a different colour over the phone, but the old work order went to the shop floor.
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Deadlines are kept in people's heads. The shop-floor supervisor remembers that the order is needed by Friday, then goes on holiday — and nobody else knows.
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The shop floor and sales can't see what the other is doing. The sales manager rings the supervisor to ask whether the order is ready, the supervisor is pulled away from work, and the customer waits for an answer.
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Nobody looks after regular customers. They are only remembered when they phone in, and they are easily lost to whoever got in touch with them first.
On its own, each of these losses looks trivial. Together they add up to missed deadlines and customers who don't come back. If you recognised your company in several of these points, read about when a business should move from spreadsheets to a CRM.
How an order moves from enquiry to shipment
In a CRM for manufacturing and sales, an order goes through stages, each with an owner and a deadline. The basic path looks like this:
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Enquiry. It comes in from the website, email, Telegram or by phone and goes into a shared database, tagged with where it came from.
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Costing. The sales manager works out the price and sends a quote. Every version of the quote is stored in the order record.
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Contract. The terms, specification, agreed changes and payment status are kept there too.
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Production. The order is set to "in progress", and the shop floor sees the work order, drawing and deadline.
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Shipment. Once the product is ready, the sales manager sees it immediately and arranges delivery or collection with the customer.
If an order gets stuck at any stage, the system flags it to management without waiting for the customer to call.
What the sales manager sees and what the shop floor sees
One system does not mean everyone sees everything. It works better when each role has its own screen:
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Sales manager. The customer, order history, amount, production stage, shipping date and correspondence. They can answer "When will it be ready?" straight away.
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Shop floor. Orders in progress, work orders, drawings, materials and deadlines. The supervisor has no need for prices or customer contacts, so these are hidden. Status updates take a single tap on a phone or tablet.
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Management. How many orders are at each stage, which are overdue and how busy the shop floor is.
The "any update?" calls stop, and what was agreed with the customer no longer gets lost between departments.
CRM for manufacturing in Uzbekistan: what to take into account
A manufacturing CRM is best set up from the start around the way companies in Uzbekistan work. That usually comes down to five things:
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Two languages. Sales managers often work in Russian, while many people on the shop floor are more comfortable in Uzbek. The shop-floor screen, statuses and notifications are worth making available in both languages, with Uzbek in the Latin script.
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Telegram as the main channel. Customers and dealers message you on Telegram, so enquiries from there should go into the CRM automatically. Stage updates go back to the customer in Telegram as well: "order in production", "ready for shipment". The customer calls less often, and the sales manager answers the same question less often.
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Soum and dollars. If quotes and costings are sometimes in different currencies, the order record stores the currency agreed with the customer. Neither the sales manager nor the accounts department has to convert amounts by hand.
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Regions and export. An order going to Tashkent, Fergana or Almaty is shipped differently: your own vehicles, a carrier, different paperwork. The shipping terms for each order are stored in its record, not in one employee's head.
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Accounting in 1C. If your accounts department keeps the books in 1C, the CRM shouldn't duplicate it — more on connecting the two below.
All of this is easier to build in at launch than to add later, when staff are already used to working differently.
Off-the-shelf or custom CRM for manufacturing
An off-the-shelf CRM works if your process looks like ordinary sales: enquiry, quote, deal, payment. You can configure its stages to suit you, it is quicker to launch, and you soon see whether the team will actually take to a CRM. For many manufacturers it's a sensible first step: after working in a ready-made system, you'll know exactly what it lacks, and your own CRM will then be built on that experience.
You need a custom CRM system for manufacturing when:
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Production doesn't fit into a sales pipeline. An order passes through several work centres, each with its own deadlines and owners.
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The shop floor needs its own simple screen. No unnecessary fields, with large status buttons.
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Costing is complex. The price depends on materials, dimensions and operations — for printed circuit boards, for example, on the number of layers, the material and the batch size — and working it out by hand takes a long time.
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You need tight integration with 1C and the website. Ready-made connectors transfer the wrong data, or not all of the data you need.
If, on top of orders, you need to handle the warehouse, materials purchasing and shop-floor scheduling, that's a job for an ERP. We explain how it differs from a CRM in our article "ERP for manufacturing: what it is and when you need it".
Connecting the CRM to the website and 1C
A CRM works better when nothing has to be copied into it by hand. A quote request from the website, a message to the Telegram bot or an email immediately creates an order in the CRM, and the sales manager gets a notification in Telegram. The source is recorded automatically, so you can see how many orders the website brings in and how many come from other channels.
1C usually remains the accounting system. The CRM takes the item list and prices for costing from 1C and passes the order back to it, so nobody has to key it in twice. If material prices change often, costing from 1C prices saves you from quotes calculated on an out-of-date price list.
Decide in advance where the master version of the data lives: for example, customers and orders are kept in the CRM, while items and prices are kept in 1C. Otherwise the same data will start to diverge, and every manual transfer is a chance to get an item code or an amount wrong.
We covered what gets passed between 1C and a website, and what breaks along the way, in our article on integrating 1C with a website — the same principles apply to connecting 1C with a CRM.
Checklist
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One database. All enquiries, wherever they come from, end up in one place.
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Status without phone calls. The sales manager can answer "What stage is the order at?" without ringing the shop floor.
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Owners. Every stage has an owner and a deadline.
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Changes. Everything the customer changed is logged in the order record, not just in correspondence.
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Overdue orders. Management sees stuck orders without a separate report.
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Customers stay. If a sales manager leaves, their customers and order history stay with the company.
If your orders live in spreadsheets and message threads, we'll go through your process and tell you whether an off-the-shelf CRM will do or you need a custom one. We describe how we build such systems on our CRM and ERP development page, and how we work with manufacturers on the "Website for a manufacturing company" page. One example of our work is the website of BOFPCB, a printed circuit board manufacturer.