Challenge:
National Tiles struggled to overcome a complex, manual scheduling process that required multiple people and spreadsheets.

Solution:
Domo lets National Tiles see a full list of jobs and contractors at a glance so they can book jobs with a click.

Impact:
Thanks to Domo, National Tiles was able to save 30 minutes of scheduling time per job, allowing it to scale its scheduling function.

National Tiles simplifies its contractor management process with Domo.

As one of Australia’s leading stone and tile installation providers, customers trust National Tiles to help make their homes comfortable and beautiful on-time and on-budget. But with locations, contractors, and customers spread across the continent, something as simple as scheduling a job was a complex, error-prone process.

“We had a need to be able to streamline our process both for our customers and our internal staff,” said Brian Smith, general manager of transformation for National Tiles.

Struggling with spreadsheet management madness.

Before Domo, National Tiles had a process that required a team of schedulers to use multiple manual spreadsheets to book jobs. “It would take the customer service team up to 10 minutes just to decide which contractor was capable of completing the installation, and then 20 more minutes to raise a purchase order,” said James Grose, national operations manager at National Tiles.

According to Grose, the process for booking contractors was not only time-consuming, but prone to errors. With information about contractor availability, skill sets, and locations all saved in different spreadsheets, the scheduling team constantly ran the risk of booking the wrong person for the job, frustrating the contractor and the customer in the process. It also began to affect the bottom line. “Mistakes would lead to us paying too much for the installation, and therefore eating into our margin,” Grose said.  

“We have roughly 1,500 jobs being installed per year, and this is expected to grow substantially,” said Grose. “I could see a freight train of work coming, and didn’t know how we were going to get through it. I would spend all of my night stressing about what was going to go wrong.” 

Managing contractors without the chaos.

Thanks to Domo, National Tiles was able to replace its manual spreadsheets with a Domo dashboard that allows the team to see a full list of jobs and what stage they’re at using data automatically pulled from their ERP. Using the inline editor and Campaigns app, schedulers can filter contractors to find and book one who is available, has the skills, and is in the right location for a project. “Domo saves us 30 minutes per job,” Grose said. “Currently, we’re booking 10 to 15 jobs a day, and that’s saving us one full-time person.” 

Not only is it saving the company money, but Grose says the new Domo-powered process has helped remove every single error that schedulers were making when booking contractors. Not only that, but their scheduling process is now scalable to meet the company’s growth expectations, providing visibility into both job projects and company finances. 

“We now have a great deal of visibility on our financial figures,” Grose said. “For example, Domo helped us discover that we had over $200,000 worth of installations that had been completed that we had yet to invoice. We quickly identified this and got those invoiced; without Domo, this would have led to a delay in invoicing and cash receipt. We can also deep dive into information and really pinpoint specific issues and margin problems that we have.”