One shop, one workshop, one office - one system
Next Concept SAS makes furniture, lighting and fire bowls from steel, every piece one of a kind. We built a three-language website with a shop, and behind it the office that carries an order from the first sketch to the paid invoice.
Where it started
A young business on the French-German border, founded in 2024, with no employees: the owner designs, welds and ships everything himself. He sells to end customers in three language markets. The old website could show pictures, nothing more - enquiries, quotes, orders and invoices lived in emails, spreadsheets and his head. Exactly where a one-person business loses its time.
One order, from sketch to customer review
The system is easiest to understand through a single piece - say, a made-to-measure fire bowl:
- 1 The enquiry arrives through the custom-order form, with a sketch and a photo. Both are attached to the enquiry; one click turns it into a customer and a quote, no retyping.
- 2 The customer accepts the quote - with a down payment and the agreed discount, which travel all the way to the final invoice.
- 3 The production order arrives with its bill of materials, work steps and a finish-by date.
- 4 Laser cutting and galvanising are done by a subcontractor: one button on the work step drafts the request, CAD files included. When the quote comes back by email, the mailbox attaches it to the right order by itself.
- 5 In the workshop, a QR job tag travels with the part. Scanning it moves the order on; the office sees "2 of 6 · now: CNC".
- 6 Shipping: the tracking number is entered once and shows on both the order and the shop order.
- 7 The invoice is generated from the order as an e-invoice (Factur-X) - the down payment already deducted.
- 8 Five days later the system asks for a customer review, in the customer’s language. Nothing is published before approval.
The number that changed everything
An order with a lot of bought-in work looked good in the post-calculation: a 30 % margin. Once laser parts, galvanising and coating were counted in, the same test case told the truth: minus 18 %. Since then, the stopwatch, the bill of materials, subcontracted work and stock movements all meet on the order - and each product carries a price suggestion built from exactly those numbers. When you work alone, you cannot afford a loss-making order twice.
The office reminds you
A one-person business has no back-office staff. So the system speaks up - once a day, only between 8 am and 8 pm, on the phone:
- Enquiries unanswered for two days, and quotes nobody has responded to.
- Overdue orders, and finished orders that have not been invoiced yet.
- Suppliers who have missed the date they promised.
- Open items in three dunning stages, and supplier invoices coming due.
What else is included
- Shop
- Variants, RAL colours, collection, discount campaigns, downloadable plans. Payment by PayPal, card or direct debit - without the email confirmation code that used to be the biggest obstacle at checkout.
- Receipts
- AI reads supplier invoices from the mailbox or a phone photo, including the payment terms. An embedded e-invoice is taken over directly.
- For the accountant
- A monthly package at the press of a button: booking list, receipt scans, outgoing invoices. Plus a change history and procedure documentation, as an audit requires.
- Visibility
- News posts go out to Facebook and Instagram automatically, products to Google Shopping and Pinterest. Visitors are counted without a cookie banner.
- In the workshop
- The office is an app on the phone, with push notifications and Face ID sign-in. Entries made without a connection are not lost.
What made it special
- Three languages down to the last email
- Website, shop, customer emails, the review request - all in German, French and English. Anything maintained in German visibly lacks its French version until it is added, rather than quietly going stale.
- E-invoicing ahead of the mandate
- France has required businesses to receive e-invoices since September 2026. Here every outgoing invoice already is a PDF with embedded XML to EN 16931 - even in the edge case of a German service provider, a French company and customers in both countries.
- AI on a short leash
- An assistant maintains products, news, campaigns and stock. Anything involving money or legal obligations - quotes, invoices, reminders - is only ever created as a draft. Sending is done by hand.
- It keeps growing
- More than 140 improvements were added in the first six weeks, each explained in the office in one plain sentence. The system was not handed over finished - it works alongside the business.
Limits
This is not a system for series production and not a point-of-sale solution. It does not model resellers, batches or shelf life. A business producing in quantity needs something else - that is a decision, not a gap.
Screenshots from a separate copy of the system with invented data.
Questions
- How long does a system like this take?
- It depends on scope. The path is always the same: a conversation, a questionnaire, a fixed-price quote, then the build. You know the cost after the second step.
- Can I start with one part?
- Yes, and usually that is the better way. Website and shop first, the office behind it once the first orders come in - the building blocks are the same, they just arrive later.
- Do I have to use the AI?
- No. It saves typing, for example when reading receipts. Without it everything keeps working - just with more manual work.
Checked 2026-09-28
Would this fit your business?
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