From 40-hour work-weeks to one click
A house's bill of materials became supplier-ready purchase orders, without the spreadsheet work-week.
Follow a finish into the purchase order.
Pick a cabinet finish for the kitchen and island. Then see that choice on the matching purchase order.
- 01Finish selections
- 02Purchase order
Two rooms. One finish.
The kitchen and island are both set to Light Grey, with Standard cabinets.
Two recorded examples from a test house.
Showing Light Grey finish selections.
The situation
Every house begins as a bill of materials. Before a single order goes out, that list has to become purchase orders: each line matched to the right supplier and formatted the way that supplier expects to receive it.
The builder was doing all of it by hand, in spreadsheets. It took 30 to 40 hours for every house. Skilled time spent copying, sorting, and double-checking instead of building.
What we built
A system that takes the bill of materials and generates each purchase order as a supplier-formatted PDF. Underneath is a relational database: every house, every line, every item mapped to its supplier, so the output is ready to send, not a draft someone still has to clean up.
Getting there meant understanding the operation first: how this builder buys, who they buy from, and what "correct" looks like for each supplier. The technology was the last 10%. The first 90% was learning the business.
A week of data entry per house wasn't a software problem until someone understood the buying first.
The result
What took 30 to 40 hours now takes seconds. One click. The people who used to spend a work-week per house on data entry got that week back, on every house, from now on. The orders going out are more consistent than hand-built ones ever were. In production, it has handled 9 houses and 4,300+ bill-of-materials lines so far.
And how this builder buys now lives in the system instead of one person's head: every supplier, every format, every rule. It survives a vacation, a resignation, or a sale.