Just outside the Windy City resides Flooring Resources Corporation, one of the largest commercial flooring contractors in the mid-west, generating revenues from 40-50 million a year. Staying on top of the finances for a company that big has its challenges, explains Molly Carlson, CIO for the company. Back in the 90s a programmer was hired to develop a tool that would help streamline their bidding process, this system worked for a time, but as the company grew so did their demands for high level construction accounting software, so they decided to purchase STRUCTURE from C/F Data Systems, LLC.
Goals
A better way to track their bid process from start to finish.
The ability to build custom reports to better evaluate their business’s finances.
More flexibility when creating bids.
Lastly, software that could better manage the workloads of their project managers.
STRUCTURE was able to meet all of those needs and more.
Results
After fully implementing STRUCTURE to handle their day to day accounting and business tasks, Flooring Resources saw instant results. They were excited to see the amount of reporting STRUCTURE offered and how it made the lives of project managers easier than ever. Creating bids also became much simpler and they love how they can create custom bid templates.
One of the biggest benefits they gained was being able to turn an awarded bid into a job and move the detail lines into a purchase order, this saves them time and money. The Quote Proposal module is a huge benefit for their business, the entire quoting process has become streamlined, but most importantly, it allows their project managers to bid smarter. The program allows them to easily see all of the bids they’ve won and lost and provide them with useful business intelligence. One such example of this was when they learned that there was this one customer who rejected over 400 of their bids, so they decided to no longer submit bids to that customer. After a while that customer asked them why they had stopped bidding to them, when they received the explanation that customer started to awarded them some jobs, so Flooring Resources started bidding to them again and have gained a new, loyal, and valued customer.
Overall it was easier for project managers to look at their jobs and get in-depth information on them. The management team at Flooring Resources loves the “Executive Center”, with one screen they are able to see all pertinent information about the entire company.
Speeding up and improving the bidding process was one of the main goals for Flooring Resources, with STRUCTURE they were able to accomplish that goal and many more.