Being one of the newest recruits to Moraware, and to the stone industry in general, the team encouraged me to visit a few of our customers here in Southern California to learn more about the inner-workings and processes of the stone industry.
The idea is that the more we understand our customers’ specific operations and needs, the better we can tailor our products to meet those needs. All of which results in us being more effective at helping stone fabricators meet their business goals!
For this round of visits, Chase and I had the privilege of touring and talking with the great people at Stone Age Tile, Superior Stone Products, and ASW in the Anaheim/Orange area of Orange County, California.
The uniqueness of each fabrication shop’s layout and processes
Each shop the we visited approached the industry in distinctly different ways. Stone Age Tile featured an extensive showroom — beautifully crafted to encourage clients to find the perfect materials and designs for their home. Superior Stone Products opted for a more one-on-one consultative approach for meeting their customer’s needs. ASW skipped the showroom entirely in favor of an immaculate conference area for their commercial clients (with stunning attention to detail). They showed us around their recently-completed build out of a brilliantly-efficient shop — complete with station-to-station crane arms, color-coded vests to designate individual roles and management ranks, and a shop layout optimized to flow from production step-to-step as smoothly and effectively as possible, with almost no wasted movement.
I was impressed to see just how well each shop had tailored their operation to their specific corner of the market, and to learn exactly how they were utilizing Moraware’s tools to improve on their business goals.
Stone Age Tile, a longtime Moraware customer, showed us how the software had effectively tightened-up their scheduling and quoting operation. They asked that we demonstrate quoting through CounterGo during our visit as well, so they could consider how to speed up and optimize their quoting process.
Superior Stone Products, a new CounterGo user as of July, asked us to show them how to complete a couple of challenging countertop drawings. This was a great example of how our new customers (and old) can utilize our growing support team and help section to get more out of their software!
We continued the tour and were able to workshop how moving their current whiteboard-based scheduling process to a tv screen running Systemize would help drastically reduce the amount of time spent writing (and re-writing) scheduling steps, and help the team track job issues and exactly what needed to be completed for each job, and when it needed to be completed by.
Finally, ASW demonstrated how they had fully implemented both Systemize and CounterGo, and how the seamless communication throughout the entire team in both the office and the shop had enabled them to operate more efficiently and effectively than ever before. It was exciting to hear members of the team rave about how useful our tools have been to their process, and to see firsthand what this looked like in action.
Takeaways
One of the major takeaways for me from each of these visits was that each shop had a desire to more fully integrate Moraware’s tools into their systems, and we made a point to encourage them to make use of our support team’s help.
Full support is included with each of our products for the duration of your account, and we encourage our customers to make full use of that support. The success of our company is directly-tied to the success of our customers, and we want each and every client to see the maximum value of our systems.
I am grateful to the people at each of these shops for taking the time to teach us about their operations. I look forward to continuing to learn and better understand the countertop industry, and how we can better help solve the business problems that our clients face.
If you have goals to speed up and improve your countertop quoting process or to optimize your scheduling workflow, we would love to have a conversation with you!
