Sanitaryware

Sanitaryware looks like a straightforward catalogue until you try to model it. Products come as families rather than items, the pieces are stocked separately, and the relationship with the customer continues long after the sale in a way it does not for most building materials.

What makes this segment hard

What a customer buys is not what you stock. A WC is a pan, a cistern, a seat cover and a fitting kit — sold as one decision, held as four line items, with rules about which combinations are valid. Get that model wrong and your system will happily quote a combination that cannot be installed.

After-sales is a live business. Seals, flush mechanisms, hinges and cistern parts are needed years later, often for a range you no longer manufacture. A parts catalogue that maps current spares to discontinued products is genuinely valuable and almost nobody has one that works.

Display sets are expensive. A dealer displaying your premium range has committed real money to it, and that dealer sells differently from one who displays a competitor. Knowing who displays what is a commercial question with a direct effect on where you spend your support budget.

Warranty follows the product, not the buyer. The installer buys, the homeowner claims, and the dealer handles it. Warranty registration and claim handling need to work across all three or they do not work at all.

What we build for it

• Product family modelling with compatibility rules, so invalid combinations cannot be quoted.
• Spares and parts catalogues linked to discontinued ranges.
• Warranty registration and claim workflow spanning installer, dealer and end customer.
• Display and demonstration stock tracked by dealer, so you know where your range is actually shown.
• Sales360 for dealer, architect and project sales management.

Where implementations usually fail

The catalogue gets built for the sales brochure and the spares business is treated as an afterthought — usually a spreadsheet held by one person in service. That person eventually leaves.

The other common failure is a warranty process designed around the dealer, which quietly assumes the homeowner will go back to the shop they have forgotten the name of.

If this sounds like your business

Tell us what you are trying to fix. You will not spend the first meeting explaining sanitaryware to us, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.

See also: building materials overview · what we have built · what we build