Tiles & Ceramics

This is where we started, and where most of what we know about building materials was learned. Our own products — Sales360, Tile View, Tile Calc and CeramicPost — exist because we kept meeting the same four problems in tile businesses and solved each of them once, properly.

What makes tile hard for software

Two boxes of the same SKU are not the same product. Shade variation and calibre mean batch has to travel with stock through every system that touches it. A customer who returns for two more boxes six months later needs the same lot, and a system that treats the SKU as fungible will confidently tell them stock is available when it is not the stock they need.

The catalogue multiplies. A single design becomes dozens of items once you account for size, surface finish, edge treatment and thickness. Generic inventory systems model this as attributes on an SKU and collapse under a design that comes in six sizes and four surfaces. Getting the product hierarchy right is the first hour of any tile project and the thing that determines whether the rest works.

Display stock is real inventory. Panels in a showroom, sample boards with an architect, tiles fixed to a display wall — all of it is stock that has left the warehouse and will mostly never be sold. Businesses that do not track it are carrying a cost they cannot see.

Large format is a different business. Slabs need different handling, different freight, different breakage assumptions and different pricing from 600×600. A system that treats them as one product family will misprice both.

The customer cannot picture the floor. A sample board tells someone almost nothing about a finished room, so the decision stalls or defaults to the safe choice. This is the single most common reason a tile sale is lost, and it is not a software problem until you make it one.

What we build for it

• Sales360 — dealer, architect and project sales management, with the specification trail from architect to eventual order.
• Tile View — the customer sees the finished room before committing, from your actual catalogue.
• Tile Calc — quantities with wastage, layout pattern, skirting and real box counts.
• Custom work — catalogue and pricing engines, dealer portals, batch-aware stock, display inventory tracking.

Where implementations usually fail

The product hierarchy gets designed for the catalogue as it is today rather than as it changes each season, and the first new collection breaks it.

Or the showroom staff are given something that needs a reliable connection, in a basement that does not have one. We build for that because we have watched it happen.

If this sounds like your business

Tell us what you are trying to fix. You will not spend the first meeting explaining the tile trade 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