The work
KADEE Industries is a leading U.S. manufacturer of stainless steel grating systems and entrance mats — designing and producing grates and grilles, roll-out mat systems, and entrance grid systems for commercial, institutional, and federal construction projects nationwide. KimbleLabs partnered with KADEE to move the company off an aging Windows XP / Outlook 2007 database onto a custom Zoho CRM environment built around multi-bidder construction quoting, a parent-child product model, real-time analytics, and a custom archive module that held the legacy records so Outlook could be retired. The cutover was completed during a hardware failure, and the team has been quoting on Zoho since.
The Challenge
KADEE was running its sales operation on a Microsoft Outlook 2007 Public Folders database hosted on a Windows XP machine — a setup a prior owner had adapted into a quasi-CRM by repurposing built-in fields for unrelated data. Quotes were produced by a Visual Basic macro that generated a Word document, pricing came from a separate Excel sheet, and customer addresses were spread across hundreds of sequentially-numbered fields. The hardware was nearing the end of its life: two of three XP machines had failed in the week before KADEE moved to Zoho.
For a 50-year manufacturer winning federal and Fortune-500 work, the gap between a growing sales operation and aging infrastructure had become a real risk. KADEE needed to recreate its quoting workflow in a system that could scale — without interrupting active bids.
Migration Highlights
KimbleLabs followed a structured plan — discovery, quote-template recreation, product modeling, picklist design, and deal and quote stage design — and completed the cutover when KADEE's hardware reached the end of its life.
The cutover
In June 2024, KADEE's Outlook server became unresponsive for several hours while quotes were due, and two other XP machines on the network had failed the same week. KADEE asked to move to Zoho right away. Working from a screen-share session provided by KADEE's IT vendor, KimbleLabs extracted the legacy data, imported it into Zoho the following day, and KADEE continued quoting without interruption.
KD Archive
To preserve institutional history, KimbleLabs built KD Archive, a custom Zoho CRM module holding the legacy Outlook records — deals, quotes, orders, notes, and line items — as a searchable historical layer. With it in place, KADEE could retire Outlook rather than run two systems in parallel.
Templates and data cleanup
The legacy quote document, previously generated by a VB macro, was rebuilt as a Zoho Inventory Template with full Terms & Conditions, Ohio tax handling, and product attribute lines. Sales Order Acknowledgment and Drawing Request templates were added alongside it. KimbleLabs also cleaned the legacy data on import — consolidating 600+ free-text shipping carriers to roughly 15 and standardizing drawing-status values — so the archive came in clean.
The KimbleLabs Solution
KimbleLabs built the CRM environment around how construction quoting actually works, with three priorities: match the multi-bidder reality of construction sales, model KADEE's products cleanly, and give leadership real-time visibility.
- Multi-bidder quoting: A single project may be bid by 20–25 general contractors under one project number. The CRM holds the full bidder list and lets KADEE send the quote to the group in one action, then narrows to the winning contractor once the project is awarded.
- Parent-child product model: A prior 105-row inventory list was replaced with about a dozen core SKUs and dependent picklists for insert, color, and frame — so quoting means selecting from a clean catalog rather than searching inventory codes.
- Quote-to-Sales-Order conversion: Awarded quotes convert to Sales Orders with the full field set preserved, and stage changes roll up to the Deal automatically.
- Real-time dashboards: A Zoho Analytics dashboard shows quote counts and dollars by week, month, quarter, and year, progress against targets, and a current backlog view — giving leadership data for ownership reviews.
- Epicor handoff (designed): The Quote-to-Sales-Order step is also the designed trigger point for a future sync with the parent company's Epicor Kinetic platform, ready for when that timeline aligns.
"There's a different level of security in having the right information in front of you. You're not just giving assumption statements — you're giving a statement with back data that you can validate. And that brings a different level of credibility."
Results
Since going live in mid-2024, KADEE has moved from a 17-year-old Outlook database to a CRM platform that supports its multi-bidder quoting, gives leadership a current view of quote activity and backlog, and runs on supported infrastructure. The most meaningful gains are operational.
- Outlook fully retired — every legacy record is searchable in Zoho through KD Archive.
- Multi-bidder quoting in the CRM — a workflow that previously lived in email and individual knowledge now runs through structured records.
- Real-time visibility — current and year-to-date quote dollars, progress against targets, and a live backlog view replaced manually-keyed weekly reports.
- A long-term platform — with the Epicor handoff designed, KADEE can stay on Zoho or extend to Epicor when the corporate timeline aligns.