Home improvement retailers and fabricators indicate that 20 percent of the industry’s $155 billion in retail business comes from installed sales, or consumers who shop retail locations and purchase cabinets, countertops or other home improvement products that are later installed in their home.
Brookfield-based Cilio Technologies LLC recently released the first commercially available web-based platform meant to help retail stores, manufacturers and distributers manage the installed sales orders more efficiently.
Historically, according to Randy Olejnik, president and chief executive officer of Cilio Technologies, the order process has been handled manually.
“In the past, the retail stores would take an order, fax that order to the installer who would go out to the home, do the measurements, and then fax the order for the materials to the manufactures and so on,” Olejnik said. “Transactions are made throughout the process and if changes need to be made to an order it could be very costly and time consuming to do so.”
The Cilio Partners Portal is a web-based order platform that allows all parties to see and manage the order in real time, Olejnik said.
“The Cilio Partners Portal allows all users to gain control over the installed sales order and management process,” Olejnik said. “We knew there needed to be a way for this complex network of players to communicate with one another and we knew we wanted to reduce cycle times, pay people faster and get the job done faster for the consumers.”
The Cilio Partners Portal was developed by Olejnik’s son, Jeremy Olejnik, the company’s vice president of professional services and development, and Alan Klumpp, vice president of security infrastructure. The two previously worked at Merge Healthcare.
“The target market for our product has been hammered by the poor economy,” Olejnik said. “The construction industry has been wrought with high unemployment rates as investments in home improvement have gone down. Our product takes the efficiency of cloud computing technology to improve existing processes to reduce cycle times and improve quality of delivery and service for everyone involved.”
