S&A Stairs triples sales and streamlines operations with Asana

Highlights

Challenges

• Paperwork was a major challenge for S&A Stairs and one of the key drivers in implementing Asana to facilitate streamlined and more accurate communication between departments.

• Across almost all departments, S&A Stairs was still writing task management notes on pieces of paper and whiteboards. This made accurately tracking project progress and changes across multiple departments challenging.

• Tracking projects in this way resulted in avoidable errors. Incorrect and missing paperwork meant the factory sometimes manufactured stairs to the wrong specs, leading to delays and wasted time and material costs redoing the work.

Solution

• S&A Stairs uses Asana Tasks as a project workflow tool. Each step of a project is entered as one of 40 tasks to complete — from quote, projects move through sales, sign-off and accounts.  The project then moves into manufacturing where the technical detailing and manufacturing takes place, and finally to dispatch and delivery.

• S&A Stairs uses custom fields and reporting dashboards to track material needs, allowing the company to better manage cash flow by keeping less material onsite and only ordering what’s required to complete current projects.

• S&A Stairs also assigned specific factory machines to custom fields, giving the company a myopic view of each machines’ task list and enabling automation of some processes, increasing efficiency in manufacturing.

Outcome

• S&A Stairs has seen sales volume triple (x3) in the last seven years with the same sized sales team.

• Onsite errors have been reduced from 50 a month down to only one.

• S&A Stairs now has clear visibility of incoming projects and revenue for the first time, making forecasting easier and more accurate.

From an IT point of view, Asana’s adaptability and flexibility has been great. Asana is amazing in that within a day or two you can have a whole process change, and that’s a great strength.”

Ensuring operational accuracy

S&A Stairs was still operating traditionally, using paper to communicate tasks and jobs from sales to manufacturing and installation. This meant paperwork frequently went missing, and outdated information caused disruptions in production, leading to costly onsite errors.

To sustain growth, S&A Stairs needed a more accurate way to track tasks, communicate across teams and maintain the high standards that their clients had come to expect. They found their answer in Asana Tasks. 

Scheduling each project process as an individual task — typically 40 in total across most projects — S&A Stairs was able to create a consistent and centralised source of truth across all projects. In doing so, S&A Stairs significantly reduced project errors from 50 a month to just one, saving the company money and time in rework.

To further ensure accuracy and streamline manufacturing efficiency, S&A Stairs assigned some custom fields in Asana to specific machines, providing a myopic view of its work lists. The company has also started to use rules to automate these processes, driving further efficiency.

We map out a job into 40 different tasks that need to be done on Asana. Each of those is a mini project — invoicing, design and so on. Once we have completed them all, the project is finished. We have about 200 jobs a week, all mini projects.”

Enabling data-driven decisions

S&A Stairs’ leadership used to operate mostly on gut feel, often completing work that came in without a clear view of how it contributed to the business as a whole. This made it difficult to understand how the business was actually faring long term or to plan resourcing and timelines to meet demand.

With Asana Tasks and dashboards tracking everything from sales to manufacturing and deployment, S&A Stairs’ leadership team, for the first time, obtained a clear view of the business, including insights into areas of inefficiency and a projected three-month pipeline.

S&A Stairs’ leadership team is now able to make data-driven decisions to improve operational efficiency, manage material ordering to improve cash flow, predict revenue based on their project pipeline and determine lead times with more accuracy to provide a better service for their clients. As a result, the company has seen sales volume surge without impacting internal resources.

We used to fumble around in the dark and everything was based on gut instinct. Our management meeting this morning, we spent the entire meeting on Asana projects. We can get a clear snapshot of quotes complete, purchase orders, and measurements ready in the pipeline. Looking at that we have forecasting for the next three months exactly what’s coming.”

Clarity, error free and looking to automate with Asana

With improved visibility across the business, reduction in manufacturing errors and a significant increase in sales, the S&A Stairs leadership team is now looking to implement Asana even more across the business. Specifically, S&A Stairs is excited to take advantage of Asana to drive further process automation as well as Asana’s AI features to continue to improve data analysis and decision making that will lead S&A Stairs to a bright future.

After using Asana for a year in sales, it worked so well we decided to roll it out across the office workflow and then the factory quickly once we figured out how it could be implemented to benefit the business.”