The piece is custom, the paperwork isn't
An order comes in for a kitchen, two doors outside the standard sizes, a wall unit that has to work its way around a beam, and that part is your trade, you solve it the way you know how because it's the reason the customer came to you instead of a furniture chain
Then the other half of the day begins, the bill of materials to write out, the panels to order, the hardware from a different supplier with codes that look nothing like yours, the order confirmation that arrives as a PDF and has to be checked against what you asked for, the costs to put on the right job
The production is different every time, the paperwork around it is always identical, and it's exactly that identical part you can take away without touching the craft work by a millimeter
The work that eats your hours
- The bills of materials to rewrite, which change only a little from one job to the next, and that little bit you have to retype in full
- The orders to the panel and hardware suppliers, each of them wanting things their own way
- The price lists that keep moving, and the confirmations that come back with a price or a date different from the one you had in mind
- The supplier's codes that aren't yours, so every time somebody translates them, often from memory
- The costs that should land on the job and instead end up in a generic pile, because that day there was a delivery to get out
This is the part that weighs the most, if the costs don't go on the right job you find out about the margin once the furniture is already fitted in the customer's home, when there's nothing left to do about it, and by then you don't even know which of the last ten jobs ate your money
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered for some joinery shop, Muffin Suite started recently and we'd rather write it down
- It reads the supplier's order confirmation, compares it line by line with what you ordered, and flags only the places where the code, the price or the delivery date don't match
- It takes the bill of materials and prepares the orders split by supplier, using the conversion table between your codes and theirs, the one you already keep in your head or on a sheet
- It logs into the supplier's portal with your credentials, the way one of your staff would at the screen, and pulls out what you need without anyone having to sit on it
- It posts the lines of the supplier's delivery note and invoice onto the job they belong to, following the allocation rules you give it
- It picks up the quote you made in Excel or in PDF and carries it into the production software with no retyping
You keep the production software and the suppliers' portals as they are, nothing changes, the system opens them and uses them the way a person does
The same goes for old programs, the ones installed on a machine in the office with no integration to the outside at all, that case is the house specialty
What stays with you
Everything that is craft, the drawing, the choice of timber, how you solve that detail the customer asked for, the price you decide to charge
The system does the mechanical steps and stops where the craft begins, a code it doesn't recognize it doesn't invent, a line that doesn't add up it leaves alone and sets aside for you, because a wrong panel order isn't a mistake you fix with one keystroke, it's a truck coming back
How much autonomy to give it is up to you, at the start it's worth keeping it on a short rein, with a confirmation before every send, then you widen it on the cases you have already seen work
Why it's worth it
In a company where the person who writes the quotes is also the one out in the workshop, office hours are hours taken away from the work that invoices, and those hours come back without putting one more person on typing codes
The other half of it is the margin, if the costs land on the job while the job is still open, you see the figure while you can still use it
How we start
I'm Antonio Fuccillo, I write the automations myself and I answer the messages myself, so you're talking to the person who does the work, with no sales people in between
You show me a procedure, a short screen recording while you do it is enough, I look at whether it can be done and I tell you the fee before we start, then write to me and we'll talk