Operations ERP for a Glass & Façade Contractor

A Singapore glass and façade specialist running multi-million-dollar projects across commercial, institutional, and high-end residential builds. Twenty-plus years of operating history. A team running operations across spreadsheets, WhatsApp threads, email attachments, a filing cabinet, and a Xero ledger that saw the numbers after the fact.

The problems were the kind that don't show up on a P&L until they're already costing money:

• Quotations took days to prepare because pricing lived in someone's head and a shared Excel file that had been forked seventeen times.
• Project margins were calculated retrospectively, often after the project had ended. Bleeding projects were identified too late to intervene.
• Site progress, procurement status, and installation schedules lived in separate places. The PM chased updates by phone every morning.
• When the founder wanted a view of the business — outstanding quotations, projects in progress, cash position by project — there was no single screen that could give it.

Off-the-shelf construction ERPs were evaluated. The two market leaders required a workflow rebuild around their assumptions, six-to-twelve-month implementations, and ongoing license fees that doubled the cost of ownership. The fit was poor enough that the team kept finding themselves working around the software instead of in it.

We proposed a custom ERP built around the company's actual workflow — quotation, project setup, procurement, site progress, margin tracking, and management reporting — rather than a configurable platform that they would have to bend themselves to fit.

The first step was a paid workflow audit. Two weeks. We sat with the quotation team, the project managers, the procurement lead, and the founder. We mapped what actually happens — including the parts of the process the team had stopped describing because "that's just how it works." The audit deliverables: a workflow map, a system architecture proposal, a phased build plan, and a fixed-price quotation.

The architecture is deliberately staged:

Each phase delivers value before the next phase begins. The business isn't waiting twelve months for a single big bang.

Construction is one of the verticals where off-the-shelf software fits worst. Every contractor's process is shaped by decades of project mix, supplier relationships, and local market quirks. The traditional answer — buy a platform, hire a consultant, force the business to adapt — costs more than it saves and leaves the team resenting the software.

A custom ERP built around how the business actually runs, delivered in phases, with AI compressing the build timeline from years to months, is a fundamentally different proposition. This engagement is in active design. The management presentation is in progress.