Building Materials & Ceramics

Every software vendor will tell you they understand your business. Here is what understanding this one actually means.

Building materials is not one industry, it is eight or nine that share a distribution model. A tile manufacturer and a pipe manufacturer have almost nothing in common at the product level and almost everything in common at the commercial level: they both sell through dealers they cannot see, into projects they do not control, from catalogues no generic system can model.

The problems we keep meeting

These recur across every segment below, which is why we built products for them rather than solving them one client at a time.

The dealer network is invisible. A manufacturer sells through hundreds of dealers and has almost no view of what happens after dispatch. Which dealers are active, which architects specify the product, which enquiries convert — all of it lives in individual WhatsApp threads and nobody’s spreadsheet. Secondary sales, the number that actually matters, is a guess.

The catalogue defeats generic software. Thousands of SKUs across sizes, finishes, grades and collections, changing every season. Most systems that handle this well were built for fashion retail, and they break on the first product that comes in six sizes, four surfaces and three batch shades.

The sale runs through people who never buy. Architects specify, contractors influence, dealers transact and the homeowner pays. A CRM built around a pipeline of opportunities cannot model that, so it fills with stale records nobody updates.

Quantities are guessed. Area and volume calculations with wastage, layout and cutting loss are done on paper, wrongly, and somebody pays for the correction.

The buyer cannot picture the product. Most building materials are bought on how they will look or perform in a space that does not exist yet. The gap between the sample and the finished room is where sales stall.

Where the segments differ

The commercial problems are shared, which is why the same products serve all of them. The details are not, and the details are what break an implementation.

• 01

  Tiles & ceramics

  Batch shade and calibre variation, display stock, and sample boards that go out and may not come back.

• 02

  Adhesives & grouts

  Sold by coverage rather than by unit, bought on a contractor’s recommendation, calculated rather than looked up.

• 03

  Sanitaryware

  Product families with compatibility rules, and an after-sales parts business that runs for years.

• 04

  Stone & marble

  Every slab is unique, so inventory is tracked at slab level rather than as quantity against an SKU.

• 05

  Cement & dry mix

  Thin margins with freight in the landed cost, and dealer schemes that drive behaviour more than product does.

• 06

  Pipes & fittings

  Thousands of SKUs with compatibility rules, and project sales quoted from a bill of materials.

• 07

  Doors & windows

  Made to order, so quotation is configuration rather than lookup and site measurement must reach production intact.

• 08

  Distributors & dealers

  Multiple brands in one view, credit extended both ways, and schemes to claim from every principal.

What we have built for it

Each shared problem has a product behind it, built because we had solved the same thing several times and it was obviously worth solving once properly.

• Sales360 — dealer, architect and project sales management for manufacturers and distributors.
• Tile View — showing a customer the finished space before they commit.
• Tile Calc — quantity and material estimation that accounts for wastage, layout and coverage.
• Sales360 Expo — capturing every visitor at an exhibition, which is where this industry still meets its customers.
• CeramicPost — the trade publication that keeps us close to what the industry is actually talking about.

Alongside them we build custom systems — dealer portals, scheme and claim management, project quotation, catalogue and pricing engines. See what we build.

What this means for your project

Your first meeting is about your problem, not a tutorial on your industry. You will not spend an hour explaining what a calibre is, why a scheme claim takes three months to settle, or why your dealers will not use an app that needs a signal.

Discovery is shorter because we already know which questions to ask — and which answers usually turn out to be wrong when we check them against what your dealers actually do.

When we say an approach will not survive contact with your dealers, that is experience rather than caution. The most common reason software fails in this industry is not the software. It is that nobody at the counter had a reason to use it.

If your segment is above and you are weighing up a system, tell us what you are trying to fix. We will tell you how we would approach it, and whether we are the right people for it.