Stone & Marble

Stone is the hardest catalogue problem in building materials, and the reason is simple: there is no such thing as a unit of stock. Every slab differs from the one beside it, the customer chooses a specific one, and a system built on quantity against an SKU cannot represent any of that.

What makes this segment hard

Inventory is individual, not fungible. Each slab carries its own dimensions, thickness, finish and vein pattern, usually grouped by block and bundle so that slabs cut sequentially can be matched for a continuous run. Stock is a list of specific objects, not a number.

Customers buy from photographs. They select a particular slab, often remotely, and expect to receive that slab. Which means photography, slab identification and reservation are core system functions rather than nice extras — and a mix-up is not a stock error, it is a rejected delivery.

Pricing has too many variables. Rate per square foot adjusted for grade, finish, thickness and sometimes the individual slab. Two slabs from the same block can be priced differently on appearance alone.

Wastage is significant and depends on the job. Cutting loss varies with the layout, the piece sizes and how much vein matching the customer expects. Estimating on a flat percentage under-quotes some jobs badly.

Reservation is not stock allocation. Holding a slab for a customer holds that object, not a quantity, and released holds have to return the specific slab to availability.

What we build for it

• Slab-level inventory with block and bundle grouping, dimensions and finish held per piece.
• Slab photography workflow, so what the customer sees is what they receive.
• Reservation and hold management against individual slabs.
• Area and wastage estimation that accounts for layout and matching requirements.
• Grade and finish based pricing, including per-slab override.
• Project and architect sales tracking through Sales360.

Where implementations usually fail

Someone tries to force stone into an ERP designed for fungible goods, usually because the ERP was chosen first. Every slab becomes an SKU with quantity one, and within a year the item master is unusable.

The second failure is photography. If capturing a slab image takes more than a few seconds at the yard, it stops happening — and a slab catalogue with missing photographs is worse than none, because customers learn not to trust it.

If this sounds like your business

Tell us what you are trying to fix. You will not spend the first meeting explaining how stone is bought and sold 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