Exterior Wholesale Supply provides commercial and residential siding installation across six states in the Southeastern US. The residential side of the business used Planswift for takeoffs, but after experiencing catastrophic problems, they knew they needed to seek out a cloud-based solution, so they chose STACK.
The Problem with On-Premise Platforms
There were constant IT issues the team struggled through, such as completing a takeoff with quotes and pricing built in, only to return to the file later to find it corrupted and unusable, causing massive amounts of rework – on up to 20-30% of the jobs they were quoting.
The team also did not have the budget to commit to using local servers and were storing items and assemblies on a single drive folder. The final breaking point happened when those items and assemblies got inadvertently deleted and, without server backups, were unrecoverable.
Without access to their essential data, Manny Corcino, EWS Commercial Estimator, says the business had to shut down for almost two entire weeks.
With approximately $3 million in sales tied up due to this issue, the EWS team was looking at a huge potential loss. Unable to get support from their current platform, they knew they had to make a switch.
Working with Web-Based Tools Instead
With no intentions of building out local file storage, EWS knew cloud-based preconstruction software was the right choice.
When the team learned how STACK works anywhere with Internet access, Manny says, it was a no-brainer for them. Both the residential and commercial teams made the switch, and Manny is now able to take his laptop with him to multiple job sites and pull up STACK right there.