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Christopher Peters Kitchens and Interiors is a luxury kitchen and interior design company who specialise in hand-crafted, hand-painted bespoke interiors. When Will Lyne, Design Director, first took over the business, the entire infrastructure was managed on Word documents. There were missed deliveries, duplication of effort and everyone was drowning in spreadsheets. Their clients are investing significant sums into bespoke designs and expect a highly efficient, service from start to finish. It all has to flow. No bottlenecks.
Will knew that there had to be a better way to manage project workflow using digital technology.
The project management of premium interior design requires coordination of many products, services and installers coming together at the right time, in the right order. That way the final installation will proceed as smoothly as possible.
Will was particularly impressed with Magnetar’s ‘discovery’ phase.
“It was a great stage – really in-depth. Lewis and Raf spent a lot of time and effort on fact-finding. We didn’t know what we needed because we don’t know those products, but they not only knew what they could achieve but took the time to ensure that it really would suit our business. They recommended and suggested even more ways forward – and they still are.”
Magnetar’s E2E (end to end) solution integrated several applications into a single, bespoke network. A CRM app, Jira, automatically logs and records every prospective sales enquiry without staff needing to input data themselves. The app ‘hands over’ to a project management app which automatically triggers all the tasks associated with each phase of a design project.
The systems are intelligently configured to ‘talk to one another.’ This creates bespoke workflows for every member of the team. Every job sheet is generated with a full set of tasks, from appliance ordering, flooring preparation and client meetings, to full kitchen installation. Making missed deliveries and duplicate orders a thing of the past.
The moment they log on, each staff member is greeted with their own ‘to-do’ task list, that forgets nothing and flags overdue tasks. Will doesn’t need to micro-manage, leaving him free to grow the business.
Before, he found himself checking and re-checking long, winding email threads to see if an extractor fan had definitely been ordered. With Magnetar’s integrated system, he has complete visibility from order confirmation, delivery date and documentation from purchase order to invoice.
When Will and his wife took over the business, data was currently archived in a variety of different systems –Dropbox, GDrive and ToDoist. Magnetar brought all of these together in Office 365, creating a single Cloud-based ecosystem tailored to their business. This required a complete migration of all data and emails, but the process was so efficient that Will says they hardly even noticed it had happened.
Christopher Peters’ bespoke system went live September 2020 and Magnetar continue to make tweaks and adjustments under the bonnet to keep everything running sweet – as the business evolves so does their IT system. It’s simple, secure and fully supported beyond go-live day.
As Will says “Lewis and Raf are still happy to review, refine, review. I can call with a request to customise the system or streamline it further and Lewis will come back within a couple of hours. He’s found a way to do it.”
Magnetar was founded by Lewis and Rafael, two individuals who just love technology and enjoy creating and configuring bespoke IT for businesses. They cherry pick the best existing software products and link them together to create bespoke solutions.
Date: February 9, 2021
Author: Magnetar IT