How Metafix Modernized Operations and Sales on Zoho One
~40
years in business
15
years of data in two
outdated systems
50–100
filters exchanged
a month
How a family-run heavy metals recovery wastewater systems manufacturer brought sales, inventory, manufacturing operations, and IoT into one platform built around its unique filter exchange model.
the Company
Since its foundation in 1988, Metafix has spent over 38 years treating industrial wastewater and recovering the silver inside it. The company manufactures and assembles wastewater treatment systems that remove heavy metals such as silver, chromium, copper, and nickel from wastewater, serving customers across aerospace, NDT radiography, film processing, and other industries dealing with heavy metal contamination.
The general industrial wastewater treatment industry has plenty of competition. But in their unique niche that the company has been building over decades, very few companies do what Metafix does. What sets them apart is what happens after treatment: they turn the recovered silver into a revenue stream for clients.
That value exchange runs on columns (tanks), replaceable filters installed at each customer’s site. Once a column has done its job, it comes back to Metafix, gets refined for its silver, and a new one goes out to keep the customer running. Metafix tracks that cycle across 200+ customer facilities today, exchanging 50 to 100 columns a month, a number expected to double as the business grows.
Metafix is a family-owned business now in its second generation. Today, Jesse Riviere serves as general manager and his brother Daniel Riviere, serves as president. The business had tried to move off its outdated systems before, but by Jesse’s own account, those efforts stalled because there was no one championing the change. Jesse joined the company in January 2026, and made it his job to be that champion for modernization.
The Problem: When Legacy Systems Couldn’t Support Growth
Historically, Metafix ran on two systems that were never built to exchange information. FileMaker Pro handled day-to-day operations. It had been custom-built in-house years earlier by someone no longer with the company, and any change to it had to go through one person. A separate system, Account Tech Connected, handled accounting, and it didn’t connect to FileMaker at all.
Double, and sometimes triple, entry for the same transaction. Every extra entry was a new chance for something not to match, and when it didn’t, someone had to track it down by hand, whether that meant a customer invoice, a dealer payout, or how much inventory was actually sitting in the warehouse.
The old systems were locked down completely. Field titles, layouts, the way data was organized, none of it could be changed. The people who used it every day didn’t just tolerate that, they built their whole routine around it, because as far as they knew, there wasn’t another way to work.
The real backbone of the business, though, wasn’t in either system. Customer account numbers, pricing, and order history all existed, but access to them depended on personnel availability rather than a shared source system. That wasn’t just inefficient, it limited how big Metafix could get. Metafix wanted that information in a shared system the whole team could use.
Why Zoho
Jesse looked at other options before choosing Zoho, including CRMs like HubSpot and heavier ERPs built specifically for manufacturers. HubSpot could handle contacts and deals, but not the inventory, assemblies, and service work that make up most of Metafix’s day. The bigger ERPs could handle all of it, but came with a level of complexity, and cost, Metafix didn’t need.
Zoho One landed in the middle: one subscription covering CRM, Books, Inventory, and Desk instead of stitching together separate tools, and yet simple enough that Metafix didn’t need to overhaul their team just to run it day to day.
Metafix’s setup wasn’t a standard CRM use case, so some of what they needed had to be built rather than bought off the shelf, things like dealer billing logic and column tracking, for example. That’s a natural part of implementing a system servicing more complex business processes.
Zoho also had to work for Metafix well past this initial build, not just solve today’s problem. As Metafix grows, more departments will need to use the system, so the solution needs to be simple enough that any of them, an employee, Jesse himself, or a Zoho expert can make or guide changes as the business evolves. Unlike the previous system, which lost its only support the day its builder left the company, Zoho comes from an actual software company: real support, a network of partners and specialists like Customerization, and now AI tools that make ongoing customization more accessible than it used to be. That combination is what lets Metafix build institutional knowledge into a shared system the whole team can rely on and grow with.
It’s worth looking at the other side of that decision too: what staying on the old systems would have cost Metafix. Jesse says the real cost wasn’t the migration itself, it was what happens when a growing business is held back by tools that can’t keep up: missed opportunities, and problems solved by hiring more people instead of fixing what caused them. In his words, “an outdated system stifles ambition. You stop trying to do bigger things because you assume your system won’t support it.”
What We Built Together
With Zoho chosen, Metafix brought in Customerization to build it out. This wasn’t a project we delivered and handed off.
Jesse knew what he wanted the new system to do, but the day-to-day reality of how Metafix actually ran lived with the team members who were best at what they did and knew the business by heart: dealer-specific pricing for every product, customer account numbers, and the equipment and order history behind them, none of it written down anywhere the new system could use.
Building this meant working closely with all of them, Jesse’s sense of where the business needed to go, and the team’s grasp of how it actually worked day to day. The Customerization team asked practical questions until we understood not just what Metafix wanted, but how the business actually ran. Everyone involved was invested in getting it right. That’s what deep Zoho expertise is for: knowing what’s possible to build, and knowing which question to ask next.
Customerization rebuilt the process around Zoho’s CRM and Forms:
- One connected system instead of three disconnected: Zoho CRM, Books, and Inventory replaced two legacy platforms, and now talks directly to Metatrax, the IoT platform Jesse built in-house to monitor equipment in the field. Client and dealer records now live in one place instead of being re-entered across systems.
- Equipment and column tracking for every machine and filter Metafix has in the field, including install status, replacement cycles, and dealer assignment. These records were all paper before..
- An RMA (internal tracking documents) system to track the return-and-refine cycle at the center of Metafix’s business, something most systems, including Zoho, don’t handle out of the box
- A serial number generator built to Metafix’s own numbering logic, able to issue nearly 1,000 serial numbers in a single batch, a capability Metafix didn’t have before.
- Sample tracking for every sample sent to a customer, including quantity, when it shipped, when it was received, and its status along the way.
- A dealer and customer invoicing engine that calculates payouts based on the average spot price of silver and the volume of liters processed, and generates the invoice automatically.
- Full Zoho Books and Inventory setup covering purchase orders, shipments and receiving, and bank feed connections, so financial data never has to be reconciled against a separate operations system again.
- Composite items to model Metafix’s manufacturing process, with a single machine involving 25 to 30 sub-assemblies and up to 200 tracked components in one item alone.
- A custom script to handle Metafix’s dealer and end-user billing structure, since Zoho’s standard limit on customer addresses didn’t fit how Metafix bills dealers and end users separately.
- A two-way connection between Zoho and Metatrax, the IoT telemetry platform Jesse built and maintains in-house, so account and equipment status updates now flow automatically instead of being re-entered by hand.
- A full historical accounting data migration, completed mid-fiscal-year, in close collaboration with Metafix’s accounting team.
Results & Wins
With Zoho fully implemented and the team trained on it, Metafix now operates on a system built to grow with the business, not hold it back. Zoho serves as Metafix’s single source of truth, connected directly to Metatrax, the in-house IoT platform, and is open to integrate with additional tools through its API as the business’s needs evolve.
What used to take spreadsheets,manual workarounds, and follow up across multiple people now happens automatically, and is built to scale as Metafix grows. That shift has freed the team to focus on the business instead of managing around its systems.
If outdated or disconnected systems are holding your business back from the growth you’re after, we’d like to hear about it.
Book a strategy call