Most teams start with one person on Operations Workbench Starter, free for 30 days. Add LevelOneAI in Claude or ChatGPT, connect your email and add any exports you have, such as open POs or a schedule. Starter shows which changes put orders at risk, with the evidence, and tracks each one to a close. When the whole team needs it, with live ERP data, approvals and write-back, that's the Operations Workbench.

How do Starter, the Workbench and the Operations Engine fit together?

The LevelOneAI Operations Engine does the work: it treats each order, PO or job as one record (Work), compares what changed with what was promised (Context), works out what it affects and who needs to decide (Decision), and assigns, drafts and tracks the next step (Action), until it's resolved. Starter runs the engine on one person's email and the documents they add. A Workbench runs it across a whole team's email, ERP and CRM for one workflow, with live data, approvals and write-back.

Is there a free trial?

Yes. Operations Workbench Starter is free for 30 days, and you don't need a card. After that it's $199/month or $1,990/year (two months free), for 1 user and 1 mailbox. If you don't continue, your account becomes read-only and your data is deleted 30 days later.

What do I need to use Starter?

A paid Claude or ChatGPT plan (the free tiers don't include the access it needs) and a Gmail or Outlook mailbox. For work email, a business or enterprise plan from that provider is recommended. Documents are optional: exports from any ERP or spreadsheet work.

What's the difference between Starter and the Operations Workbench?

Starter works from one person's email and the exports they add, and you set it up yourself in minutes. It's built to show the value on your own work. The Operations Workbench connects live to your ERP and planning data, runs on its own, puts the whole team in one queue, and adds approvals, drafted follow-ups and write-back. Starter fees paid in the 6 months before you buy a Workbench are credited toward its setup.

Which documents should I add to Starter?

Whatever you have, or none. It works on email from the first run, and tells you which document would sharpen the results most. Typical ones are an open-PO export, a production schedule, open sales orders or an AR aging report. It keeps only the fields it needs from them, encrypted, never the files.

It says what it doesn't know. Each fact shows its source and when it arrived. When an email could match more than one order, it asks instead of guessing, and when a document is missing it says "impact not assessed" rather than "no impact." Your team makes the call.

How does billing work?

Starter is billed monthly or annually by card, with a receipt emailed for every payment and invoices on your billing page. Cancel anytime. A Workbench is a one-time setup fee, invoiced on the schedule in your quote, plus an annual platform fee that starts at go-live.

When does my team need a Workbench?

When the work depends on more than one person's inbox: the evidence sits in your ERP, CRM or planning data, several people need to see the same item, and someone has to make sure it closes. A Workbench gives the team one queue, one record per item, approvals and a team view.

What's built, and what do you configure for us?

The Operations Engine, the work queue, the work record, approvals, follow-up tracking and the team view are built. For each Workbench we configure the connections to your systems, the rules that decide what counts as an exception, who owns what, what closes an item, and whether approved changes are written back. Which systems it connects to, and how, is worked out during setup.

Operations Workbench Starter is free for 30 days, then $199/month or $1,990/year. An Operations Workbench is a one-time setup fee, from $20,000 per workflow, plus an annual platform fee that's included in your quote. There's no ongoing services fee: once it's live, your team runs it, and our help is optional. The platform fee covers hosting, AI processing, connector updates and improvements to the Operations Engine. It starts at go-live, and in the first year you can cancel 90 days after go-live if the agreed measures aren't met. The payback calculator compares the setup fee with what the delay costs you each year. The next Workbench reuses the connections you already have, so it costs less to set up. See Pricing for what's included.

How long does setup take?

Starter works the same day. A Workbench typically goes live in 6 to 12 weeks, depending on how many systems it connects and how complex the rules are. We agree the baseline and what success looks like before setup starts.

What happens to our ERP and CRM?

They stay where they are and keep the master data. A Workbench reads from them. Write-back is optional: whether approved updates go back, and to which systems, is decided during setup. Nothing changes in your systems without approval.

What data does LevelOneAI keep?

It's designed to keep only what it needs to run the work, such as references to the source, the facts it extracted (a date, a quantity, a price), status, owners and decisions. For a Workbench, exactly what's stored is agreed with you during setup. Starter never stores email: it keeps short labels, plus the fields it needs from documents you add, encrypted.

What will this ask of our IT team?

Starter needs no IT: you connect your own email in Claude or ChatGPT, and there's a one-page security summary to share with IT. A Workbench needs read-only access to the systems the workflow uses, granted once by whoever administers them, and typically a few hours of IT time during setup. Nothing is installed, and nothing changes in your systems without approval. See Growing Businesses if you don't have an IT department, or Enterprises for how we fit an IT review.

What happens when it isn't sure, or data is missing?

If an email could belong to more than one order or PO, it shows the candidates with their evidence and asks a person to confirm, instead of guessing. If a source is unavailable or a record can't be found, the item is marked incomplete, so your team knows the picture isn't complete. Every fact is labeled confirmed, conflicting, inferred or unknown.

Is this a product or a consulting engagement?

A product. The Operations Engine, the work queue, the work record and approvals are built. Setup configures them to your systems, rules and owners for one workflow. You pay a one-time setup fee and an annual platform fee. There's no ongoing services fee, so your team runs it without us.

Do you have a SOC 2 report?

No SOC 2 report yet. We'll walk your security team through the data flow and complete your security questionnaire on request.

What happens to our data if we stop?

You can export your work history and audit trail. With Starter, your data is deleted 30 days after you cancel or after a trial ends without a paid plan. Your ERP and CRM keep their own data, because they were the record all along.

That's decided with you during scoping, based on your security and IT requirements.

To read the messy information around a piece of work (the email, the attachment, the system field), match it to the right order or PO, compare it with what was promised, and recommend the next step. Every fact is labeled confirmed, conflicting, inferred or unknown, with its source. Your people make the call, and nothing changes in a system without approval.

Why can't we just add an AI agent?

You can, and it will do the steps. What an agent won't do on its own is keep one record of each order across email and your systems, notice a change nobody asked about, know which promise it breaks, and keep the issue open until it's resolved. That's what you'd have to build and maintain around it. LevelOneAI already does that, and works alongside the agents you use. See Why AI Agents Fail under Resources.

How is this different from process mining?

Process mining reads event logs from your ERP or CRM, so it can't see what happens in email, spreadsheets and phone calls, which is where most exceptions start. It also tells you where the process breaks; it doesn't work each exception to a close. A Workbench does.

Why not wait for our ERP or CRM vendor to add AI?

Use it. ERP AI is getting good at work inside the ERP, such as reading a supplier's email and proposing the PO change. A Workbench is for what happens next, across systems: which jobs and customer orders the change puts at risk, what the planner's sheet says, who has to approve, and whether it was actually resolved. If the problem starts and ends inside your ERP, its own AI may be all you need.

When is our ERP's own AI enough?

When the problem starts and ends inside the ERP, updating the record is the whole job, and everything the decision needs is already there. Add a Workbench when the change matters because of what it affects elsewhere (jobs, customer orders, invoices), when the numbers people trust live in a spreadsheet or portal, when resolving it takes several people and an approval, or when someone has to confirm it was actually resolved.

What if our workflow changes?

Rules, owners, thresholds and closing conditions are configuration, so they can be updated as your process changes, without a new project.

What if our team doesn't adopt it?

A Workbench brings the context to each piece of work instead of asking people to go and look for it, and it fits around the systems they already use. We also agree the measures up front, so you can see whether it's working.

All insights

General

You Might Not Need a Bigger ERP Yet

By Shanshan "Sasha" Ma

Growing past $5M, the chaos gets blamed on your systems. Often it's coordination, not records. How to tell which problem you have before signing an ERP project.

"We were told we'd outgrown QuickBooks. What we'd actually outgrown was the coordinator's memory."

A customer emails at 9:40 asking when their order will arrive. The coordinator opens the supplier portal, then searches her inbox for the vendor's last reply, then checks the order spreadsheet. The portal says the 18th. The spreadsheet says the 12th. Buried in a thread from last Thursday, the supplier mentioned a two-week slip. Nobody updated anything. The customer now hears about the delay from a scramble instead of a heads-up.

Somewhere around $5M to $50M in revenue, this becomes a daily pattern. And somewhere in that range, someone tells the operations leader: you need a real ERP.

Maybe. But first it's worth asking which problem you actually have.

Two problems that look like one

As a company grows, its operating complexity outgrows its systems. The information is all there, just in different places:

Orders live in the accounting system, the CRM, or a spreadsheet.
Customer commitments live in email.
Supplier status lives in portals and vendor emails.
Project and delivery dates live in people's heads.

So coordinators spend their days reconciling, chasing updates, and flagging problems by hand. It feels like a systems problem, and part of it is. But two different problems are tangled together here.

Managing records and transactions. What was ordered, invoiced, received, and paid. How much inventory exists. What the official balances are.

Coordinating the work. What's happening with each order right now. Which supplier commitment slipped. What information is missing. Who needs to act, and what could go wrong next.

An ERP is built primarily for the first problem. It can support the second, but the second is mostly made of emails, phone calls, and judgment, which don't arrive as clean transactions. Plenty of companies finish a long ERP implementation and still have a coordinator reconciling a portal against an inbox.

So the real question isn't "do we need an ERP?" It's this: do we need a bigger system of record, or do we first need a better way to coordinate work across the systems we already have?

Sometimes the answer is both. It's rarely only the first.

What an ERP-first path asks of you

A properly scoped ERP can be exactly the right call, and some products are built specifically for smaller manufacturers and distributors. But a full implementation still asks a lot of a 40-person company: platform selection, process redesign, data migration, training, and months of disruption while the business keeps shipping.

That's a reasonable price when you need what an ERP does. It's a hard price to pay when the pain you're trying to fix is coordination.

Before you spend a year implementing a new system, find out how much of your operational chaos you can eliminate by connecting the systems and information you already have.

Here's how the two approaches differ:

Starting point. ERP-led: choose and implement a core platform. Coordination-first: find the most costly workflow gap.
Scope. ERP-led: often several business functions at once. Coordination-first: one operational workflow at a time.
Existing systems. ERP-led: migrate or integrate extensively. Coordination-first: keep them where practical.
Information. ERP-led: structured transactions. Coordination-first: structured data plus the messy context around it (emails, PDFs, portals).
Problems. ERP-led: configured processes and alerts. Coordination-first: AI-assisted interpretation, prioritization, and early warnings.
Adoption. ERP-led: new processes and training. Coordination-first: fits how the team already works.
When value shows up. ERP-led: as the implementation progresses. Coordination-first: in a bounded first use case.

What coordination-first looks like

Picture a composite: a $20M industrial distributor, 40 people, running QuickBooks, HubSpot, Excel, Outlook, and a handful of supplier portals.

Today: A customer asks about an order. A coordinator checks supplier emails, a portal, and a spreadsheet. The supplier's date has slipped, but the internal tracker is stale. The customer finds out late, and the coordinator spends the afternoon cleaning it up.

With a coordination layer:

Supplier emails and portal updates are matched to the right order automatically.
The current supplier date is compared with what was promised to the customer.
A likely delay is flagged before the customer has to ask.
The coordinator sees the evidence, the impact, and a suggested next step in one work queue.
Once she approves, the right person contacts the supplier or customer, and the official record is updated through a controlled step.

Nothing in the stack got replaced. QuickBooks still holds the books. HubSpot still holds the customer. What's new is a dependable way to keep the state of each order current and to show what needs action.

They may still need an ERP someday. This doesn't automatically remove that need. It lets them run better before they buy one, and it can shrink how much ERP they end up implementing.

When this buys you time, and when it doesn't

The deciding factor is the capabilities you need, not your revenue or headcount. An honest breakdown:

Accounting works; order tracking is manual. A coordination layer connects operational information and surfaces risks. Still need ERP? Possibly not yet.
Orders and supplier commitments are scattered across email and spreadsheets. A coordination layer builds a workbench around each order. Still need ERP? Not necessarily, if core records stay reliable.
Inventory counts are wrong and stockouts are common. A coordination layer can surface discrepancies, but inferred data shouldn't be treated as your inventory record. Still need ERP? You likely need a proper inventory system.
Production scheduling, bills of materials, and material planning are loosely controlled. A coordination layer can coordinate information around them. Still need ERP? You likely need MRP or a manufacturing ERP.
Finance, purchasing, inventory, and production all need one authoritative source. A coordination layer bridges gaps and supports the transition. Still need ERP? ERP is likely the right move.

If you're in situations 1 or 2, a 12-month implementation may be solving the wrong problem first. If you're in 3, 4 or 5, a coordination layer helps, but it isn't a substitute for a real system of record.

Try this week

Follow one late order backward. Write down every system, inbox, and person someone touched to find out it was late. Count the hops.
Ask your coordinators how much of their week goes to finding and reconciling information versus actually deciding something.
Look at the five situations above and pick yours honestly. If it's 1 or 2, scope the single workflow that hurts most before you scope an ERP.

That's where LevelOneAI starts: one costly workflow, built on top of the systems you already run, with a person still making the calls. Keep the software that works. Fix the part between it.

Talk to us