The company

Northwind Manufacturing

Northwind Manufacturing is a 60-person specialty chemicals contract manufacturer. They mix, bottle, and ship over 400 SKUs of industrial cleaning products and food-grade sanitizers to distributors across the Midwest. Founded in 1987, the company is in the middle of a multi-year modernization program: new ERP, ISO 9001 certification, expansion into the Southeast, and a quiet AI initiative that has been running for two years.

Founded

1987

Headquarters

Madison, Wisconsin

Employees

60

Annual revenue

$42M

Departments

Northwind has 7 departments. Every person, every project, and every piece of knowledge is attached to a department. The Company Brain is the cross-department view of the company's shared knowledge.

Executive

4 people

HR

5 people

Sales

12 people

Operations

15 people

Finance

6 people

IT

8 people

Engineering

10 people

Total

60 people across 7 departments

Active projects

Northwind is in the middle of a multi-year modernization program. The 6 active projects are the work that the company is doing right now.

PROJECT

Customer rollout

Migrate 142 active distributor accounts to the new ERP portal

Owner: Bartosz Lewandowski

PROJECT

Hiring

Hire 6 line operators and 2 process engineers for the night-shift expansion

Owner: Hassan Al-Rashid

PROJECT

ISO compliance

Achieve ISO 9001:2015 certification by end of Q3

Owner: Roberto Silva

PROJECT

Infrastructure

Replace the line-2 SCADA stack and the aging on-prem file server

Owner: Wesley Tran

PROJECT

Sales expansion

Open a 3-state Southeast territory (TN, KY, GA) by Q4

Owner: Reggie Williams

PROJECT

AI initiatives

The internal AI tool rollout — Claude for engineering, Copilot for office, internal automation for ops

Owner: Wesley Tran