TwinEngines’ built a CPQ engine for the stone industry using the TwinEngines Business Process Platform and Business Central.

Marmi Stone Case Study

Marmi Stone is one of North America’s largest sources of architectural limestone, marble, and granite. Founded 60 years ago in the heart of Cairo, Egypt, where the art of stonework was invented, the company sources material from more than 40 quarries worldwide and has its North American headquarters in Atlanta, GA. Marmi serves thousands of clients worldwide, providing the ultimate in high-end stonework, accents, flooring, countertops, and furnishings.

Situation

As their business grew, Marmi Stone decided they needed more value out of their existing Navision ERP system. Manual processes introduced inconsistencies, slowing customer response time and making even simple reporting and business analytics impossible. They viewed their existing processes as a competitive advantage, but the high customization required to run their business made their ERP system challenging to adapt to.

The company saw an opportunity to modernize its internal systems to address existing challenges and help scale with the growing business. They wanted a partner to transform their daily work into digital workflows and resources.

Task

TwinEngines was asked by the executive team at Marmi to help them find new ways to handle the increasing demands of their business:

• Add velocity to Marmi’s ability to respond to customers, move from quote to job, and convert inventory into revenue
• Provide a central hub for process automation for the business: sales activities, quoting, opportunity, scheduling, inventory, production, job costing, shipping and invoicing
• Provide real-time reporting and visibility across multiple aspects of the business
• Offer a predictable business model – a low-risk, cancel at any time, monthly recurring pricing model from TwinEngines to help with budgeting and finance
  

Action

For a predictable monthly fee, TwinEngines assigned a Solution Architect to be the liaison between the two organizations.

The Solution Architect met weekly with Marmi to:

• Validate, define, and prioritize the given business objectives to establish timelines and checkpoints
• Capture all systems, processes, roles, and methods relevant to the business objectives
• Generate a working map of all architecture and workflow dependencies to be used as a guide during subsequent solution development

Solution

With the objectives defined, the timelines agreed upon, and the environment mapped, it was time to start crafting the solution. Over the next few months, TwinEngines:

• Migrated Marmi from their existing Navision tenant to a Microsoft Business Central tenant inside a Marmi-owned, TwinEngines-managed MSFT Azure instance.
• Created “Marmi Hub,” a web-based custom CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) tool that:
• • Seamlessly integrated into the sales team and allowed them to maintain their existing customer quoting customization while also providing a digital capture tool that could kick off additional processes once the customer signed off
  • Provided CRM functions like account tracking, contact management, marketing lists and opportunity tracking
  • Created data integration between multiple existing Business Central systems that enabled downstream workflow automation. These include opportunity management, quote creation, customer acceptance, project creation, inventory management, scheduling prioritization, job tracking, shipping, installation, and invoicing.
  • Provided the business with a central system to build in granular dashboard and reporting capabilities for visibility into critical functions like job profitability, sales funnel, opportunity tracking, project status, labor, inventory, and costs

The simple monthly fee model provided a predictable, low-risk, cancel-at-any-time cost that Marmi could easily incorporate into their business.

 Results

• Opportunities – Inbound inquiries now automatically generate an opportunity in the system that launches a multi-step, Marni-unique, pursuit, build, deliver, close process which has eliminated costly mistakes and provided velocity and scale that didn’t exist before.
• Proposal Creation – The process integrates information from multiple sources and builds an accurate proposal for the customer in a fraction of the time it used to take.
• Workflow Automation – Upon customer sign-off, the system creates a project, earmarks and adjusts inventory, schedules resources, and facilitates job progress through shipping, installation, and invoice.
• Realtime Reporting – At any time during the business cycle, Marmi Hub can generate reports and dashboards that answer any question for the business in real-time, resulting in higher profitability, fewer mistakes, and a better customer experience.

For less than the cost of a full-time employee, TwinEngines developed a proprietary solution – Marmi Hub – and integrated it with Business Central to deliver up-to-date pricing and other ERP financial data.

The system modernizes how Marni Stone approaches their business and provides the scale and velocity for growth now and in the future.

Marmi Hub Screens

Opportunities Screen | This built-in CRM tracks every opportunity from first contact to delivery.

Customer Opportunity | This drill-down view shows the every projet component at a glance.

Slab Sourcing | Project materials screen includes a slab view.

Customer Proposal | All relevant data is configured into a presentation view.