Atlanta Kitchen & Bath Makeovers, Inc (AKBM)

AKBM is a is fast-growing business that has been experiencing the usual operational pressures of small businesses as they try to keep up with rapid growth while not sacrificing the quality and service which was the driving factor in their success to date. Typical of many small businesses, AKBM’s operational systems consisted of a patchwork applications, including QuickBooks, Excel and Outlook. This solution resulted in large expenditures of time and effort and was a critical roadblock to operational efficiency and future growth.

To maintain profitability, it is critical for AKBM to accurately document and price the many services and materials required of a project. This information must then be summarized and presented as a proposal. Once the proposal is accepted, the ability to use this same information to create and manage purchase orders to subcontractors and suppliers is necessary to reduce duplicating information and increasing operational efficiency. As project bills are paid, accurate job cost tracking is especially important to manage the profitability of the project.

AKBM looked at many different solutions available in the marketplace for construction management, including several well-known solutions employed by a significant number of large construction firms. All of them were lacking in capability from using out-of-date technology and the inability to be customized to the unique business processes of AKBM. Based on this analysis, AKBM made the decision to custom-build a construction management solution encompassing the areas of contact management, estimating and order management, payment processing and scheduling.

Having a previous career in enterprise software development, AKBM’s president well understood the challenges of building such a system using limited resources and facing critical time pressures to put this new capability in place. AKBM recognized that the only way to be successful in this endeavor was to leverage next-generation software component technology to reduce the amount of software code that had to be developed. Along the way, AKBM found some terrific technology from IdeaBlade which would greatly reduce the amount of development required by encapsulating the back-end database processing. Not only did it accomplish this, but perhaps more importantly resulted in a system that was built with virtually no errors and operational from the first release.

The initial Phase 1 release was created in 2 weeks, and included the capability to manage customers, product and service offerings, and the estimating capability. The Phase 2 release was created in another 2 weeks and included order management and invoicing. Having such great success with the initial development, AKBM has plans to incorporate additional capabilities into the software in the near future including a web-based customer portal which will leverage the transactional capabilities developed in the smart-client application.

Developing this solution would not have been possible without the great technology and support we received from the talented folks at Ideablade. Even though we are a small company, the quality of service they provided was exceptional and instrumental to our success. In this new area of email-only support that many companies are providing, the ability to speak directly to IdeaBlade’s engineers and receive immediate quality support was critical so our development efforts weren’t delayed and our deadlines could be met. In summary, we couldn’t be happier with our new application and would recommend anyone looking at developing new applications take a strong look at the technology and services of IdeaBlade.

Jeffrey Kennedy, President AKBM

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