Tech Talk, with Hamilton Building Supply
John Perna, president of Hamilton Building Supply, hesitated to describe the Garden State company as an “early adopter” of technology. But the Hamilton, New Jersey-based prodealer celebrating its 100th year in business is faster than a typical “fast follower.” The company’s operations continue to adapt and adjust in a variety of ways.
[The following is excerpted from HBSDealer’s June Technology Issue, coming to mailboxes soon.]
Perna spoke with HBSDealer on a number of tech-related topics:
The need for speed
We use tech to create speed and efficiency. So we've always believed that the faster we can respond to a customer, the more likely we are to get the sale. If we’re the first to respond, we’re going to be that much more likely to get the order, regardless of pricing. If we are the first ones out there with the quote, customers truly appreciate it.
Recent initiatives
Our ERP system is Epicor Eagle, and it’s been a good solution for us for a very long time. We've bolted on other third-party systems around it to suit our needs as things change. One of these is our CRM and project management tool. We use a third party called Pipedrive, and it basically creates a web-based folder for any project with any parameters that you design.
So if I receive a set of plans, I can drop it into Pipedrive. I can then create quotes out of our ERP system or quotes from our Andersen or Marvin quoting tools. I can drop those into a Pipedrive project folder. I can communicate out of it. I can tag other associates in our organization who may be working on the project, and I can message them in relation to the project. We’ve been using Pipedrive as a solution for us to help manage some projects and get more of the project scope, because that’s ultimately what we’re after, achieving more of the wallet share from our customers.
Online store
We just relaunched our online store through Toolbx. And they’ve created a platform that's specifically for independent dealers, but it essentially is a web-based platform that aligns very closely with that of Home Depot and Lowe’s and their e-commerce platforms.
Customers pay their bills online very easily. Not that they couldn’t do it before, but now we’re snappier and more efficient. It’s all integrated with Google. So if you log into Google or if you have Google credentials and your credit card saved on file and your passwords are saved, it'll tie in with that.
And it’s just a lot easier to use Hamilton’s online store now than it ever has been before. I can pay my bill now very easily or log in to see my open orders and current account statement very easily. So that’s been good for us.
AI use cases
For us, where we use AI specifically is if we're working on a report, or if we're trying to design a spreadsheet and it's going to require some special formula, we turn to ChatGPT or AI for that because it helps us create the formula right away without having to do the long math to figure it out. It's like, hey, cool, I just found a formula online, or it will tell me how to do it.
We also use it to write job descriptions. Or, if we need to write some longhand text that’s somewhat generic in nature, it's a good starting place for us, and it definitely saves our people some time.
What’s next
AI is going to continue to be a thing for us going forward. What I would love to see AI do is help with takeoffs and plan management, because that’s probably our biggest bottleneck—it’s how do we use AI to take-off plans as quickly as possible and develop material lists. What would be nice is if you basically drop the plans into some software that automatically did the take-off based on your specificity and printed out a materials list within a matter of minutes. And I think that would be a huge, huge boost for the industry just to be able to return plan designs faster to customers, and get their project started sooner. I think eventually we’re going to get there.
