Paradise Building Specialties, Inc
Paradise Building Specialties, Inc was a wholesale window and door distributor for Eagle Window and Door. PBS Opened in January 2004 and grew to 15 employees with sales over six million annually serving over 250 retail dealers. When Andersen Windows bought Eagle, becoming Andersen’s E- Series, they converted Eagle\’s distribution model to Andersen\’s direct model. PBS was invited to sell retail, but declined and dissolved in March 2012.
I served a variety of technical and administrative roles during PBS’s eight year business cycle.
- IT Network Administration and support of 15 employees.
- Sage CRM Customization, Administration and Training
- B to B Customer Web Portal Development
- Web and Graphic Design
- Executive Assistant to Allen Hamlin, President
- Accounting set up and support services
- Marketing
- Customer Service
Start Up
My first project was establishing the technical systems necessary for the partners and a hand-full of employees to work from home while we found the office/warehouse space.
Then working closely with the President, Alan Hamlin to design and implement the interior work spaces, conference rooms, warehouse and shipping/receiving areas. Selecting the computer and office equipment, setting up QuickBooks and designing the operational work flow systems were tasked to me.
The luxury window and door business has unique challenges. Like the long sales cycle and large volume of technical details ranging from blue prints to after sales service. Like most wholesale businesses we also had multiple layers of client/vendor relationships. In order to manage such a complex business cycle we choose Sage CRM, an early standalone version of Sales Force that was customized by Integrated Tech (Sage CRM vendor) to transfer data to QuickBooks.
After working with Integrated Tech to map the data fields and design the data transfer processes I was trained to further customize the Customer Relations Management web application and maintain it on our in house servers and later Rack Space server.
The PBS logo, well blended with the existing background in the upper left corner, is only the beginning of the customizations. Every area of the existing screens was customized with many additional layers of functionality like multi-level pricing, individual line items per quote/order, and shipping methods.
Quote/ Order Screen
The right side of this screen shows custom buttons like New Line Item, Promote to Purchase Order, Promote to Invoice. The workflow buttons include options for paying commission reprinting the order acknowledgment or canceling the order.
Line Item Detail
This screen displays details including ship date, estimated delivery, status, total value, pricing level, and profit margin.
Workflow buttons include options for shipping, attaching to a service case and requesting a change order.
Workflow
An administration screen showing a close up of the workflow diagram designed by me.
The Dealer Resource Center interfaced with the CRM as a B to B full-service dashboard. Access was limited to the PBS client list.
Marketing
Marketing options include access to logos, literature, co-op balance, displays, and samples. An invitation to share advertising images as well as a photo release form are also featured.
Complete Project Tracking
Dealers are able to drill down into the details of their project to track quotes, orders, service cases, installation inspections, and download all related documents.
Custom Written Help
This part of the Dealer Resource Center included a custom written by me help section for each screen.