Farmers couldn't afford to wait 14 days to restart operations.
At eFishery, farmers routinely settled their financial obligations for aquafeed and cultivation services using a portion of their harvested fish. But reconciling each settlement took two full weeks (14 days).
This was not merely an internal operational inconvenience; it was a direct business threat. Fish farming is capital-intensive and highly cyclical. To restart their pond cycles, farmers needed immediate settlement confirmation so they could purchase their next batch of feed and fingerlings.
Because the internal reconciliation dragged on for 14 days, farmers were forced to delay restocking or turn to predatory middlemen and alternative sourcing channels.
When a back-office settlement process takes 14 days, the friction falls squarely on the customer. Slow settlements eroded farmer trust, degraded working capital turnover, and threatened customer retention.
The problem wasn't the people. It was disconnected workflows.
The settlement process involved three distinct departments: Sales, Sourcing, and Finance. Each team was populated by hardworking individuals, but each operated with conflicting priorities, separate tools, and isolated definitions of success:
Needed fast settlements to close the farmer's outstanding debt, unlock new credit limits, and immediately start the next farming cycle.
Needed harvest purchase paperwork finalized, weights calibrated, and vendor bills logged so they could complete vendor obligations.
Required every settlement journal to be strictly supported by posted invoices, validated vendor bills, and verified bank credentials.
Because the teams lacked a single shared system, they relied on email threads, spreadsheet attachments, and manual cross-checks in Odoo. A question from Finance would sit in a Sales inbox for 48 hours; a missing bank verification would send the file back to square one.
The inevitable result was 14 days of administrative friction.
Centralizing the settlement working paper into a shared data product.
Rather than simply building isolated automations for individual teams, I reframed the challenge as a shared data and state-machine problem.
We designed and built the CRM AR-AP Settlement Module, an integrated operational layer connecting our internal CRM platform with Odoo ERP and external verification services.
Real-time sync of posted receivables directly from Odoo, establishing verified farmer obligations.
Harvest purchase valuations pulled directly from approved procurement bills, eliminating manual calculations.
Integrated 3rd-party banking API to automatically verify farmer accounts, preventing disbursement errors.
Once all validations match, the system compiles the settlement and posts the counter-journal to Odoo automatically.
- Manual spreadsheet working papers created per case
- Scattered email threads between Sales, Sourcing, and Finance
- Multiple manual searches across Odoo ERP modules
- Manual banking lookups prone to clerical errors
- Repeated reconciliation loops when paperwork failed review
- Unified digital working paper accessible to all three teams
- Real-time automated status indicators and handoffs
- Pre-validated posted invoices and vendor bills from Odoo
- Instant 3rd-party bank account verification via API
- Direct one-click journal entry generation upon approval
Why I rejected the shortcut: Speed vs. Compliance.
During solution design, the Sourcing team proposed accelerating the workflow by allowing draft vendor bills to serve as the counter-journal basis. On paper, this would shave an extra 24 hours off the cycle.
I explicitly rejected using draft bills. Permitting draft records would create catastrophic accounting risks: if a draft bill was later modified or voided by Sourcing, the reconciled AR would fall out of balance, resulting in unverified revenue leakage and failed audit controls.
The goal was not to make the process faster by cutting compliance corners. The goal was to make it radically faster while making Finance's controls even more airtight.
By holding firm on this decision, we secured total buy-in from the Finance leadership. Because they knew the system enforced their controls programmatically, they eagerly adopted the tool and agreed to an SLA reduction from 7 business days down to 24 hours.
Leading through cross-functional alignment.
As the Lead Product Manager, I owned the initiative from problem discovery through technical architecture, development, and enterprise rollout.
The engineering implementation was relatively straightforward because our existing CRM architecture had well-defined REST interfaces. The true complexity lay in organizational change management:
I conducted joint alignment workshops bringing together skeptical department heads. By visually mapping out where each department was losing time and demonstrating how the shared working paper protected their respective metrics, we converted inter-departmental finger-pointing into collaborative problem-solving.
Settlement lead time plummeted from 14 days to 2 days.
The turnaround metric was tracked from the exact timestamp when a Sales representative initiated a settlement proposal to the moment Finance posted the final balancing journal entry in Odoo.
Across all pilot branches, lead times dropped from an average of 14 days down to just 2 days. Farmers received clearance within 48 hours, enabling uninterrupted pond stocking, boosting farmer retention, and dramatically accelerating company working capital recovery.
Local optimization creates global bottlenecks.
Cross-functional processes rarely break because individuals are inefficient. They break when teams optimize locally while depending on one another globally.
The most impactful product interventions in complex enterprise systems are rarely about automating a single team's routine. They are about creating a shared system of record and a unified workflow that empowers distinct teams to execute autonomously while staying flawlessly aligned with the broader organization.