Quoting and Paperwork
Making cabinets is a complicated process, but we're working with Brian's Cabinets to make it a little easier. Brian's Cabinets is a high-end custom cabinet builder with over 60 employees. We've built a web-based business application that creates accurate quotes for big cabinet projects, taking into account every detail. Then, the application helps Brian's Cabinets follow the project from start to finish, tracking how long each project is in the various stages of production and generating all the necessary paperwork for each department.
Brian’s Cabinets's Opportunity
Brian's Cabinets was previously managing projects through a complicated spreadsheet-based system. Project management was time-consuming and prone to occasional errors, as staff entered the same information multiple times. In addition, accurate project quoting was difficult to achieve and quotes often needed to be manually adjusted.
How We Helped
We built Brian's Cabinets a custom Node.js-based application that handles many aspects of project management. The application generates accurate quoting numbers and saves Brian's Cabinets more than 50% of their time quoting over their old system. It then generates paperwork for the various production stages of the project, eliminating the need for staff to re-enter information.
Our Process
Brian’s Cabinets came to us with a mostly-developed web application built to generate project quotes. We needed to complete the quoting functionality, and to expand the application to handle more of the cabinet production and installation workflow. The existing application was built in PHP and the Dojo Javascript framework.
As we looked into extending the application, we realized the PHP application was working well for quoting, but was not easily extensible to include new functionality. So we decided to build a new application based on Node JS, Express, and Angular. We then integrated the PHP quoting application as one component of the new application. This has allowed us to easily add functionality.
After the cabinet quoting process is finished, several documents need to be created using project data: a contract for the customer, a packet of cabinet specifications for production staff, forms describing materials that need to be purchased, etc. We built a robust document generation system and carefully refined the presentation of several different documents and forms.
The application also tracks several aspects of the cabinet production process, and we are adding reporting and graphing functionality to help Brian’s analyze project efficiency and cash flow. We work very closely with staff at Brian’s Cabinets to continue to build and expand this program.