Custom chemical manufacturer replaces manual paper-based workflows with integrated manufacturing, inventory, and quality management processes.
The Mobile Rosin Oil Company supplies highly customized chemical products to customers ranging from individual buyers to Fortune 500 manufacturers, sourcing raw materials globally across oil and gas, tire manufacturing, and industrial processing.
It started, more than 100 years ago, refining tall oil from pine sap. Today its raw materials come largely as byproducts from major chemical companies — "We take their trash and turn it into useful products," as Scot Wood, Director of Information Technology, puts it.
What hadn't changed, until Sage X3, was how the manufacturing ran. "Prior to X3 everything was paper. Everything was manual," Scot says. Supervisors pulled formulas from manual batch books. Ingredient lists were handwritten for plant operators. Quality data was recorded by hand throughout production. Shipping, invoicing, and inventory all followed the same pattern. The limiting factor on how fast the company could produce wasn't its equipment—it was the human processing time wrapped around every batch.
Scot is well placed to judge the change. He runs the entire IT function himself—a one-man operation supporting a 50-person manufacturer—after two decades as the company's outside consultant before joining full time in 2018. Sage X3 went live the following year.
Custom chemical manufacturing introduces a complication most inventory systems aren't designed for: the product changes after you've planned it.
Temperature, humidity, viscosity, and atmospheric conditions all affect yield. A production run planned for 45,000 pounds might deliver 44,000 one day and 46,500 the next. "45,000 pounds of a product may be. It may not be," Scot says. "It just depends." That variability runs through every stage of the operation—from raw material intake through production, quality testing, and shipping. Managing it accurately requires a system flexible enough to reflect how the business actually works, rather than one that forces a highly specialized manufacturing process into logic built for standardized physical goods.
"It's only as good as the data that's in there," Scot says. Staying on top of that data—especially as raw material costs now move daily rather than yearly—is a continuous discipline. But the system gives the company a way to track and respond to movements that would have been almost impossible to manage manually at this pace.
"It's all trackable, traceable, which helps with our ISO."
Scot Wood
Director of Information Technology
With Sage X3, Mobile Rosin Oil Company digitized manufacturing, inventory, quality, shipping, delivery, and invoicing across the business. Production formulas now live in the system, and scaling a formula for a different order size is instant.
The old way, Scot explains, was a chemist with a written formula and a calculator—multiply the percentages out, add them up, work out how much of each component to pull. Now the same blend can be set up for a five-gallon pail, a 55-gallon drum, or a 2,000-pound tote and adjusted in seconds.
"You can just instantly adjust the formula and go with it," Scot says. That has changed what's commercially viable. The company has always prided itself on taking any order, however small—but a one-off 55-gallon drum that once required a chemist to rebuild calculations by hand is now trivial to produce. The small custom orders that used to be barely worth the effort are now easy to say yes to.
Traceability improved across the board. Rather than chasing an issue across departments and paper records, teams can drill directly into production batches, quality results, customer returns, and inventory history inside X3.
"It's all trackable, traceable, which helps with our ISO," Scot says—and the value of that runs straight to the bottom line. Traceability means regulatory compliance, it means tracking the money, and it means being able to follow a problem from a customer return all the way back through production to see what happened, at what stage, and how it was fixed. Previously that might have meant talking to six or eight people to reconstruct the story.
The change also reduced the company's dependence on individual employees. Before, isolated functions sat with single people—one shipping manager who also handled purchasing, invoicing, and payroll. If he was out, getting product shipped meant work stacked up days in advance to compensate.
"If that shipping manager was out, it was hard to get product going," Scot says. "Now other people know how to do it and it can get done."
Work is more distributed, staff are more cross-trained, and the business can keep moving when someone is unavailable.
"Before we were limited on how fast we could make the product. Now we're limited on how much we can store."
Scot Wood
Director of Information Technology
The headline result is measurable: Mobile Rosin Oil Company estimates Sage X3 cut manufacturing process time by roughly 35–40%. The company makes more product in less time, handles small custom orders that used to be uneconomical, and scales production without adding processing overhead.
But the most revealing indicator is where the constraint now sits. "Before we were limited on how fast we could make the product," Scot says. "Now we're limited on how much we can store."
The ceiling is no longer paperwork and manual calculation. It's physical capacity—a different kind of problem, and a better one to have. With production already maxed out at its current site, the company is preparing to expand: additional facilities, a move from on-premise to cloud-based X3, and AI-supported automation, alongside a document-management push to make compliance records instantly accessible.
For a manufacturer operating under OSHA, ISO, and federal regulatory requirements, that accessibility is a risk-management priority—being able to produce any record the moment an auditor asks for it. With compliance documentation, manufacturing records, and operational data all housed in Sage X3, that's exactly what the next stage of the business is being built toward. "We want to go forward, not backwards," Scot says.
