About us

Built to run a distribution business, then sold to run yours

Novel Systems, an operating division of Novel Blinds Inc., Ontario, Canada. The division builds and operates the software; the parent is the legal entity that contracts, invoices, and carries the obligations under it.

Two dates, because they belong to two different things. Novel Blinds Inc. has traded in Ontario since 2019. The software is younger: it was written inside that business in 2023 and spun out as Novel Systems in 2026. Every figure on this page counting years of software counts from 2023.

These dates were corrected on 4 August 2026. An earlier version of this page counted software years from 2019, the parent’s start date, which described the engine as older than it is. That correction, and every other published claim on this site that has changed, is listed with its date and its old wording in the corrections record. If a figure here differs from a copy you saved earlier, that is where to find out why it moved.

Novel Systems did not start as a product. It was engineered inside Novel Blinds Inc. as an internal CPQ and fleet dispatch engine for its wholesale window covering distribution operations across Ontario — configure, price, quote, then get the right crew and the right stock to the right site — because two estimators were the only people in the company who could price a job correctly, and one of them was usually in a van.

In 2026 that internal engine was spun out and commercialised as a standalone, enterprise-grade B2B vertical SaaS platform for industrial distribution and commercial manufacturing fleets. Running a real distribution business on it for 3 years is the whole argument for selling it. The parent is still our first tenant and our least forgiving one.

3
Years building configuration and dispatch software, since 2023.
5
Ontario macro-regions covered, on Canadian-resident infrastructure.
6
Distinct eras, each one a constraint we hit before we built our way past it.

SOC 2 Type II audit underway · PIPEDA compliant · Canadian data residency · ca-central-1 · SAML 2.0 single sign-on

Our vision

Trade knowledge should outlive the person who holds it

Every operation we work with has the same structural fragility: a rule that decides money — a deduction, a discount schedule, a dispatch convention — exists only in one person’s judgement. It works, right up until that person is on holiday, retires, or simply gets it wrong on a Tuesday.

The fix is not to write the rule into application code, which just moves the fragility to a release cycle. The fix is to make the rule catalogue data: declared, versioned, effective-dated, and reviewable by the person who actually knows whether it is right.

That is the whole thesis. Everything else on this site — the constraint solver, the offline journal, and one engine compiled to four runtime targets so a client preview and a server commit are the same code — is engineering in service of it.

You can reproduce any number we publish

Every latency figure on this site states its percentile, the hardware it was taken on, and the network conditions assumed. Availability figures state the window and the monitor. Without those, a number is not something a reader can check.

Business rules belong in the catalogue

A deduction table, a discount schedule, and an approval threshold are data. When they live in application code, changing who signs off on a discount becomes a deployment.

Anything shown to a customer must be reconstructable

Every quote revision and dispatch assignment is an append-only entry. The version of this that survives a dispute is the only version worth building.

Degrade to less, never to nothing

A total network outage should leave a quoting desk quoting and a technician completing jobs. A thin client is a blank screen exactly when it matters.

Growth timeline

Each era started with something breaking

None of these were roadmap decisions. Each one was a constraint we hit hard enough that working around it stopped being cheaper than rebuilding.

2026

Residency and governance formalised

Every tier consolidated onto a multi-AZ active-active footprint in AWS ca-central-1, PIPEDA alignment documented end to end, and a SOC 2 Type II observation window opened with an independent auditor.

What it unlocked: Procurement reviews that used to stall on a data-location question now clear on the first pass.

How the division is organised

5 functions, each accountable for something specific

Each card states what that team owns when something goes wrong, which is the part of an org chart a buyer actually has a use for. We publish functions rather than biographies on purpose: headcount changes, and the accountability does not.

Executive Leadership

Division strategy, commercial commitments, and the claims on this site

Roadmap, pricing policy, audit scope, parent-company alignment

Every published figure, threshold, and compliance statement is signed off here. If this site claims something the platform cannot do, that is not a marketing error — it is an executive one.

Configuration Engineering

The constraint solver and the catalogue that feeds it

Constraint solving, catalogue compilation, deduction modelling, margin floors

If a published catalogue produces a cut list a shop floor cannot cut, it belongs to this team and to nobody else.

Field Ops Team

Dispatch, routing, and the technician app in the customer's hands

Offline sync core, dispatch optimisation, route sequencing, mobile reliability

Accountable for the app working in a basement, and for every sync conflict that reaches a human being a conflict that genuinely needed one.

Platform & Residency Engineering

The API surface, the edge deployment, and where the data physically sits

Edge deployment targets, versioned API, tenant isolation, Canadian data residency

Owns the claim that production data does not leave ca-central-1, which means owning every subprocessor decision that could make it untrue.

Enterprise Support Engineering

Implementation, price-book modelling, and the incident queue afterwards

Onboarding, ERP reconciliation, severity triage, escalation to on-call

Responsible for the first ninety days — the window in which an implementation either replaces the spreadsheet or quietly runs beside it — and for every severity clock published on /support.

Officer accountability

Four offices sign for the division. Each one states what it approves, so a procurement reviewer can address a question to the office that can actually answer it rather than to a general inbox.

Co-Founder & Chief Executive

Commercial commitments, pricing policy, and the parent-company relationship with Novel Blinds Inc.. Signs the master service agreement and every claim published on this site.

Co-Founder & Head of Product Engineering

The constraint solver, the catalogue compiler, and the offline sync core. Owns the release process and the decision to ship or hold.

Head of Platform & Data Residency

Tenant isolation, subprocessor approval, and the ca-central-1 residency commitment. Named counterparty for security questionnaires and audit scope.

Head of Enterprise Delivery

Implementation, ERP reconciliation, and the severity clocks. Named in the statement of work as the escalation owner for the first ninety days.

Leadership & functions

Eight functions run the division day to day. Each states what it owns, so you can tell what is staffed here rather than inferring it from the size of the product.

Founder & Chief Executive

Sami Abdul Sayyid Al-Khouri

Pioneered the commercialization of Novel Systems from an internal operational engine into an enterprise-grade CPQ and Field Service Management (FSM) platform. Works at the intersection of manufacturing, specialized architectural installation, and software engineering, driving the company's vision to eliminate estimation errors and automate complex field workflows across trade industries.

Head of Product Engineering

Jos Buttler

Architects and oversees the technical development of Novel Systems' CPQ engine, mobile technician applications, and dispatch orchestration platform. With a background in distributed systems and real-time industrial software, leads a multidisciplinary engineering team building high-availability SaaS infrastructure for commercial trade operations, built to the SOC 2 Type II control set now under audit.

Account Executive — Full-Cycle Sales

Ahmad Zafar Khan

Drives full-cycle B2B SaaS sales motion for commercial contractors, trade operators, and specialized installation firms. Responsible for self-sourcing mid-market opportunities, leading technical product demonstrations, and structuring ROI-driven SaaS proposals that help trade business owners streamline parametric quoting, margin protection, and dispatch logistics.

Customer Success Manager

Amanda O'Connor

Owns post-sale onboarding, trade platform configuration, and long-term retention for contractor accounts. Partners directly with customer operations teams and estimators to build custom rate cards, configure skill-matching dispatch rules, and drive software adoption and ROI realization from day one.

Engineering Lead / Senior Software Engineer

Matthew Schwab

Leads core software development for Novel Systems' parametric calculation engine and real-time scheduling APIs. Specializes in full-stack Next.js/Node.js architecture, high-concurrency database design, and sub-second cut-list logic execution, with the margin floor enforced at the line across multi-line commercial quotes.

Implementation / Solutions Engineer

Sandeep Singh

Serves as the technical bridge between sales and engineering through onboarding. Responsible for integrating Novel Systems with a customer's existing software stack, including QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, and custom ERP systems, and for configuring custom price books and complex deduction tables.

IoT & Hardware Integration Specialist

Kin Chuen

Leads technical integration between Novel Systems software and commercial hardware protocols. Specializes in provisioning payloads, scene bindings, and commissioning exports across automated shading, KNX, DALI, Somfy RTS, and Lutron Sivoia systems, extending CPQ capabilities directly into smart building automation.

Finance & Accounting Manager

Emily Miller

Manages financial operations, SaaS recurring revenue accounting, and corporate compliance for the Novel Systems division. Oversees subscription billing through Stripe and PAD settlement, vendor management, financial reporting, and fiscal alignment with parent company Novel Blinds Inc..

Note on this section: offices and functions are published; a name appears only where the person it belongs to has agreed to be published here. Escalation reaches a named person the moment you have a contract — your implementation lead and on-call escalation path are named in the statement of work, not on a marketing page where they would be out of date within a quarter. To reach an office before that, write to sales@novelsystems.ca and name the one you want.

Coverage

Field coverage across 5 macro-regions

The platform deploys anywhere. This section is narrower and says so: it is where our own crews run, which is where the routing engine was calibrated. Drive times were modelled against dense-core service windows and 401-corridor congestion first, because that is where we were losing the hours. The regions are broken out so an operator can find their own corridor rather than read a continent-wide claim and wonder what it covers.

These are territories served, not locations we occupy. Delivery is remote-first — implementation, configuration, and support run over video and the API — with on-site attendance arranged per engagement.

Greater Toronto Area

The densest concentration of accounts, and the conditions routing was modelled against first: narrow delivery windows, booked loading docks, and drive times that bear no relation to straight-line distance. Most engagements that need someone on site get one soonest here.

Golden Horseshoe Region

The arc from Niagara through Hamilton and up around the lake — a high concentration of commercial manufacturing and building-products distribution, and the customer base whose price books carry the most tier and volume-break logic.

Southwestern Ontario Industrial Corridor

The 401 manufacturing belt running west to the border. Longer legs between stops and fewer crews to absorb a re-sequence, which is why re-optimisation mid-route matters more here than anywhere denser.

Eastern Ontario & Ottawa Valley Corridor

Ottawa and the corridor along the river, where a meaningful share of accounts carry public-sector procurement requirements — which is where the residency posture and the audit trail stop being a slide and start being a gate.

Central & Northern Ontario Distribution Nodes

Distribution points serving territory where a wasted trip costs a day rather than an hour. Coverage here is deliberately node-based and scheduled in advance; the platform is built so a technician can complete a full job with no connectivity at all.

Software has no service area — infrastructure does

Production runs in AWS ca-central-1 (Montréal), active-active across availability zones in the same region. No production record is stored or processed outside Canada. Deployment and support are remote across Canada; the regions above describe where a person can be scheduled to show up in a van.

How to reach us

Novel Systems
Enterprise cloud software · built in Canada
Ontario, Canada

The platform is delivered as enterprise cloud software from Canadian infrastructure. Implementation, configuration, and support run remotely, with on-site API onboarding scheduled per engagement for trade operators across North America. Postal mail goes to the registered address on your order form.

(437) 237-6827

Corporate structure

© 2026 Novel Systems. Novel Systems is the commercial software division of Novel Blinds Inc. All rights reserved. Novel Systems, an operating division of Novel Blinds Inc., registered in Ontario, Canada.

Practically, that means Novel Blinds Inc. runs its own quoting and dispatch on this platform in production. A regression reaches its estimators before it reaches yours.

See it run on one of your own quotes

A working session with a solutions engineer, twenty minutes. Bring a configuration your team priced by hand and we resolve it in the engine while you watch, against your own rate card. Every figure on this site publishes the conditions it was measured under, so you can check those in the same session.

Book Enterprise Demo Read the architecture

Arrived here looking for the software rather than the company? The Novel Systems platform overview is the shorter route to what it does — the CPQ engine, the dispatch board, and a calculator you can drive yourself.