This post is sponsored by Microsoft for National Small Business Week 2016. This series discusses how small businesses use technology to drive their success.
After the Great Recession of 2008, many consumers decided not to move and sell their homes, but update them instead.
Imperial Kitchen and Baths is an award-winning 50-year-old remodeling business in Brookfield, IL. Their retail location still includes a showroom, design, general contracting services, and an in-house custom cabinet and counter top shop.
Business manager, Stephanie Bullwinkel, says the company uses SharePoint Online on Microsoft Office 365 to house One Note binders on each transaction with their clients. This includes documents of transactions with vendors, Excel files for contracts, Gantt charts, before and after photos of the home, sketches and designs. Microsoft Surface Pro allows the sales staff to take photos of the job, document notes on those photos, and draw sketches of floor plans directly in the binder without paper. This also enables the office staff to start working on a project before the salesperson returns to the company location.
Outlook connects to SharePoint and allows all employees in the office to refer to common scheduling calendars. They are planning in the future for this to include Gantt Chart data.
in addition, Imperial developed a Microsoft Access database that the entire team could use. From this database, they order, track materials, subcontractors costs, and in-house labor costs. Changes to the contract and the client’s payments are recorded in this data base as well. Customized order forms, client invoices, and profitability reports are printed from this application. Once the client moves forward with the project, the material list is already set-up for Access. A two simple copy and paste actions populates the database with all the information the office staff needs to start moving forward with scheduling and ordering materials for the project.
Imperial also uses a second Access database to track clients and leads. When someone contacts their company that person’s information is put in their lead database and automatically assigned a number. This becomes the basis for job contracts, invoices and purchase orders. By tracking clients, they know the source of the best clients, how long it takes them to purchase, and what projects have been historically sold to them. This data is also leveraged for many marketing campaigns. They plan on revamping the system so that the two databases are combined and then integrated into SharePoint Online.
While Office 365 is being utilized by just the office and sales staff right now, in the future, they hope that their field staff will become connected and have immediate access to client files, drawing and designs. This will help with making the chances of error on the job site even lower.
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