We are
a commercial and residential millwork manufacturer
that means that we're making panels, cabinets, ceilings,
things like that that go into homes and office buildings.
A lot of it' s wood, a lot of it's plastic.
We do our own metal.
And so we're actually manufacturing these products ourselves
from scratch.
Taking a lot of analog data from the field,
making measurements primarily and information
about what the environment or building in looks like and moving that
through our system into a digital system where we end up with a product,
cabinet or paneling, whatever it might be, is complicated.
And there's a lot of technology involved in doing that.
Integrating that technology is a constant effort.
Claris plays an important part of that.
We use FileMaker Pro
to put all our jobs into its estimating tool as well.
It's a big database, so it's where we get our proposals out, it's where
we get our work orders out.
You can still add on to it, which is really cool
because it doesn't really stop until you're happy with what it has.
I use Claris FileMaker on a daily basis. All of our remote
people can see it right away.
I don't have to send separate emails
or separate text messages or something.
All their information is updated as soon as my stuff is updated.
Interesting thing about me personally is
when I first started working here, we did have FileMaker Pro.
It was a really, really basic—
I mean, this is 20 plus years ago—
really basic program, but I used it all the time.
What we were really looking for
was a way to do estimating bidding jobs.
It was really— our old system was just really difficult.
A lot of data entry, a lot of room for error.
And when we got Claris FileMaker,
I mean, honestly, on day one, we were up and running.
There was— it's so intuitive. It's so easy.
Anybody could could use this and we were putting out bids on our very first day.
We didn't have to go through a bunch of training and, you know,
all this learning curve, it was right out the gate.
We can't think of business processes,
reports, applications, ways of working
that Claris allows us to do that
we were able to do with our old accounting system.
Claris FileMaker works for us because it allows us to dream again.