How a US smart glass manufacturing company scaled to $5 mil. in revenues with the help of digital tools and automations.

How a smart glass manufacturing company implemented smart automations and digital transformation in their business?

Not long ago passed by an office building and saw at the first food near the lobby a specially arranged zone with glass and at that moment I asked myself how are they done but most importantly who are these companies and how do they operate, work, how are the processes organised and did they implement certain automations or digital tools in their work process to help them constantly grow.

The next day I got the chance to get introduced to William Vasile Turcan and while having our chat he tells me that owns and operates a smart glass manufacturing company in US called Smartglass Technologies. It immediately sparked my interest to find out more, especially that he mentioned that they manufacture smart glass and that they digitised a lot of their operations since starting the business which seems even more very interesting since a lot of manufacturing businesses still operate in the old way and lots of tasks and operations still being done in a very manual way.

We had a discussion where I asked him to tell me more about his business and how he implemented various digital tools and automations to streamline the operations and whole work process in the company.

How did the business start? 

The business started in 2018 with his partner from Canada. They met at a conference in Miami where they both found that they could work and do business together since Vasile liked the idea and the product his future partner was building, which was the smart glass.

They started working together and manufacturing smart glass for office and residential spaces. They did the website, registered the company and the first orders they got in March 2018.

How SmartGlass Technologies operates and works? 

Vasile started this business with digital transformation and automations in mind. He mentioned that before even starting this business, years before he read a book called “Automate this” it gave him a lot of interesting insights of how many things in a business can be improved with the help of digital tools and automations.

The company manufactures smart glass for residential and commercial spaces. The product is custom made for each client according to the needs, sizes and other requirements of the specific space where the smart glass will be installed.

What automations and digital tools did they develop and implement? 

They made a website to capture the leads from their marketing campaigns and after someone completes the form they get to a Thank You page where they are notified that someone will contact them. A similar confirmation they get also on email to remind them that they will be contacted.

They hired an assistant to contact all the people who completed the form and go through a set of questions to find out more about what they need and set up an appointment with their installer.

They’ve set up a CRM where they manage all the processes including the meetings the assistant sets up for the installer. The installer gets an automatic calendar notification from the CRM with the time and place of the meeting and they confirm it.

Once the installer arrives at the client’s site for initial measurements and discusses the requirements they have a pre-made form with questions they need to go over with the client and complete each one with the required information. They implemented this tool with forms to ease the work for installers where they can also upload photos from the site if necessary.

💥The tool with the forms also offers the ability to view statistics and see if it’s a new order or a reorder because of a mistake which was made by the team.

After the installer finishes the appointment and completes the form an email with a spreadsheet is automatically sent to the manufacturing team for review.

At the same time the assistant prepares the quote with all details from the form and is sent again from the CRM. From the CRM they send to the client the contracts, track the payments and also automated invoices.

In addition to the CRM they also use Quickbooks for financials to add the order, contracts and the payments which helps them have everything organised and automated when it comes to reporting and analysing different financial metrics.

The company also developed a back-office tool with different level of access for (founders, sales person, installing team and dealers they work with). In this back-office tool they have all the contracts with the installers they signed, also presentations, marketing and training materials for the dealers. Here they also have written the mission and vision of the company even in the back office tool so that everyone they work with and has access to this platform can see this every time they access it. They mentioned it’s important for everyone to know this about the company to be able to relate and see that this is a company with purpose.

When the manufacturing team receives the automated e-mail with the spreadsheet that has all the details about the order there is also a checklist they need to go through before starting the manufacturing process which was also pre-set. So as we see here everyone who is involved at any stage of the order starting from the first call with the client up until delivery is getting automated notifications with instructions and the information they need to perform their tasks and because the process is seamless and automated the company can process the orders very efficiently offering a great customer experience.

After the product is ready the product manager is notified and tells the logistics manager to prepare the order for pick-up and delivery. Even though the manufacturing process is not tracked in real-time they have a set time when the production manager should notify about the status which also makes it easy to track the progress of each order.

Even if during the manufacturing process there are delays the client is notified automatically form the CRM about this.

✅Conclusion

🚀 The company’s yearly revenues are now at $5 mil. and 50 people work for the company.

🚀 Since inception until now the company completed about 2000+ projects, and some big ones are a Hospital in Toronto, a Hospital in New York, various Netflix shows, a Star Trek Movie set and a Bank office.

Vasile mentioned that if he didn’t implement the digital tools and automations since starting the business they wouldn’t be able to scale to this level this period of time and otherwise he would have remained a local local small factory because of micromanagement and a lot manual tasks and processes that wouldn’t allow to allocate time and resources for growing the business.

When discussing with Vasile about the whole process he mentioned 2 important things that every business owner should think about and highly consider.

1. When he started the business everything was thought for 30 years ahead and

2. The digital tools and automations he implemented were done with the end client in mind to offer a great customer experience and high quality product which results in happy customers. Who doesn’t like to make the customers happy?

He advises other business owners or operators to think about who is the end user or for whom they want to do this digital transformation, is it for employees or end customers and to invest in the best experience that can be offered, that’s when the digital transformation will have positive results.

Together with Vasile we came to a conclusion that digital transformation actually helps the company scale consistently and in a healthy way. The company is able to adapt quickly to market changes and also helps you prepare for an exit strategy if that’s the goal of an owner at some point. PE firms or other investors will be more interested to acquire a business where all the processes are straightforward, digital tools and automations take care of the tedious tasks and all of it together making it an easy business to understand and scale it.

You can follow what they do and their work here.

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