From Six Spreadsheets to One Source of Truth

Commercial Food Sanitation (CFS), an Intralox company, helps food manufacturers around the world tackle food safety, hygienic design, and sanitation challenges through consulting, training, and deep industry expertise. Its Food Safety Specialists work in the plant and in the classroom, across four regions and eleven languages. To run that global operation, CFS had built a capable CRM and professional services automation system inside Excel - a testament to operational ingenuity. But as the team grew, the seams began to show.

The challenge

The spreadsheet-based system worked, right up until it started to crack. Multiple people editing at once corrupted formulas. Data had to be entered exactly right or the KPIs would not calculate. Nothing connected to Outlook, so Food Safety Specialists re-keyed the same information across their calendars, the CRM, and payroll.

Keeping the data clean took daily effort from the Operations Director plus a standing weekly meeting. And the deepest cost was strategic, not clerical: CFS Food Safety Specialists create the most value in the field, not behind a laptop maintaining spreadsheets.

What we built

Quantify opened with Forging Foundations, our requirements-gathering phase, focused on how the team actually schedules and reports rather than on the software it wanted to replace. We asked probing questions to reach the real desired outcomes, mapped the current process end to end, and studied how the tool had evolved and where CFS wanted to take it next. That let us design for the future state rather than rebuild the past one.

Forging Foundations pointed at a named destination, a Core Business Platform Build. From there we designed and implemented the CFS Scheduler, a Core Business Platform built in Airtable and structured as a proper relational database. Customers, agreements, plant visits, and Food Safety Specialists are all linked with referential integrity, so information entered once flows through to scheduling, agreement tracking, visit checklists, and KPI reporting.

The build did more than digitize the old spreadsheets:

• A custom relational Airtable database linking customers, agreements, plant visits, and Food Safety Specialists.
• Automated Outlook calendar sync that removed the double-entry burden entirely.
• Proactive alerting that surfaces upcoming visits, renewals, and resource conflicts before they become problems.
• Real-time KPI dashboards and a mobile-friendly interface so specialists can work from the plant floor.

To land it globally, Quantify migrated the data, ran synchronous and asynchronous training with office hours across all four CFS regions, and supported a structured cutover followed by a post-launch monitoring and refinement window.

The outcome

Redundant work has disappeared. The double and triple entry across Outlook, the CRM, and payroll collapsed into a single point of entry, and the standing weekly data-hygiene meeting - along with the daily cleanup it depended on - is gone. More than 3,700 scheduled days for a global team now live in one connected system with mobile field access, freeing Food Safety Specialists to spend their time where they create the most value.