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Like many companies, Closet Works started from meager beginnings. In 1987 without an installation van, Mike Carson, owner of the Elmhurst, Ill.-based company, carried the panels and shelves for his first job from the basement of his Chicago home down the alley to the client, says Kristina Ferrigan, marketing director for Closet Works.
Carson used the profits from that first job to buy an installation van. "We started in my basement, and I guess the key is we grew without any capital and we grew by my doing every job," Carson says.
Everything Closet Works makes is design made to order. "Our closets are going to be more like snowflakes," Ferrigan says. "There are no two that are quite the same." Ferrigan says that since a closet is such a custom space in a home, it is rare to ever find two identical closets. This is true even in condominiums where the floor plans are the same in each unit, she explains.
"The chance that you're going to get two of those closets to be exactly the same is still very slim," she says. "The walls could be off by an inch or two. Obviously the homeowner is a different person with different needs. So where theoretically somebody could say, 'I want the exact same thing,' once we're done consulting with them and really making a strong assessment of their needs the likelihood that they would wind up with a duplicate of anything that's out there is very slim."
MAKING IT HAPPEN WITH SOFTWARE
Although the designers at Closet Works still do much of their designing by hand before turning it over to the engineering department, software integration has been integral to the company's process of designing and manufacturing.
"About 10 to 12 years ago we finally got to where we started using the Cabinet Vision, and that was mostly for the formalization of the process," Ferrigan says. "It was kind of our midpoint. We would get it and we would have hand-sketched drawings from our designers turned in to the engineering department where they would create the finished product and put it back to the client for presentation approval."
About five years ago Closet Works began using CAD software. At first, this posed quite a challenge for the company.
"The challenge most smaller companies have, including us, was that we had purchased CAD software when we were smaller, say $1 million, or $2 million in sales, but we were too small to actually have someone dedicated to it," Carson says.
Carson warns that if you are going to use CAD software, you need to have a person within the company dedicated to implementing it and making it work for your operation.
"Most companies that are between $1 million and say $5 million may not be able to get it implemented effectively because it takes a lot of attention and it takes a lot of work. A lot of those companies don't have the personnel to do that," he says.
"I was that way. I bought the copy and we played with it for a little bit, but then we got too busy to project it. We had to get out there and sell. Then it just sits on the shelf and collects dust."
To Carson, the integration is never complete. "You never really have it fully implemented because there is change and there is progress and things innovate. But, I think we've been pretty consistent through that in the last year."
Closet Works recently integrated the software to the back end of the engineering department, now allowing them to skip a lot of intermediate steps and go straight from the screen to the machine, Ferrigan explains.
The back end of the engineering department creates all the information the shop is going to need for production, including creating machine code, automation, lists, ordering and allocations, among other things, Mike Hallman, engineering manager, says.
"Everything is screen to machine. We run two ways of production, nested-based and strip production, and both are automated. We've been doing it this way for about a year."
Closet Works uses Cabinet Vision to optimize all of its batching. "Our yield on material went drastically down," Hallman says. "The amount of material we're using is a lot less than what we're putting out."
Hallman says the software does it all for Closet Works. "It does all of our allocations, all of our pricing, all of our manufacturing in one complete tool," he explains. "A lot of smaller companies will only use it for the front end or only use it for the back end — or not even use it at all."
ELIMINATING MISTAKES
The greatest benefit the company has seen from the software implementation is the reduction in mistakes, Hallman says.
"The fewer times information changes hands, the fewer opportunities you have for errors," Ferrigan says. "I think that's kind of the running theme here. The fewer times a thing has the potential for somebody to make a mistake on it … that's wasted board, that's wasted time, that's wasted installers driving out. For us to avoid mistakes pays dividends at all levels of the company."
The software is also crucial in gathering data about the company, Carson says. "As you get software implemented, you're able to gather data, which is critical. If you can gather data on growth margins per job, waste factors in the shop and other things, you're going to run a better business," Carson says.
Closet Works recently worked with Planit Solutions to help develop Solid Design for Closets and Solid Manufacturing for Closets, new software the company is about to release.
The software is designed specifically for the closet and storage industry. This is one of the first releases from Planit that involved such a high level of industry input in its development, according to Paul Losavio, marketing and communications director for Planit Solutions.
Planit Solutions started development in the early months of 2006 and released the Closet Module at the Closet Expo in Schaumberg, Ill.
"Planit Solutions requested information from Closet Works and several other closet companies across the U.S., finding out what the closet Industry really needs in a piece of software," says Scott Norris, the Planit sales representative that worked with Closet Works. "Having several conference calls with larger companies in the industry and also doing survey's to closet companies that were using previous versions of Cabinet Vision."
"We worked with one of their integrators for about two days and everything was fully integrated with our catalog that was already set up," Hallman says. "We were 100 percent, totally involved with what took place. We basically took a catalog that had just basic parts and added all of our machinery for the closet industry."
The changes in the software have helped Closet Works dramatically. "We can't sell enough to keep the shop busy because they are so efficient due to the engineering," Carson says. "The efficiencies of screen to machine are just so phenomenal that the shop really has twice the capacity that we have to sell right now. We're obviously focusing on the sale side right now to feed the machines."
PROMOTING THE INDUSTRY
Promoting and growing the company is vital to Carson and everyone else at Closet Works. However, the company also is very involved in promoting the industry as a whole. In 1999 Carson started the National Closet Group, which is a group of noncompetitive companies "getting together to share information and to benefit through cooperative marketing and purchasing and networking," Carson says.
The group has grown to about 50 companies. About a year and a half ago, Carson resigned so he could start the national association for the industry — the Association of Closets and Storage Professionals (www.closets.org).
"Basically our focus there is to promote the industry, identify it, education not only within the industry but educate consumers on what we're doing, educate other trades like builders and architects on what they need to know around this virgin industry to make it better for the client," Carson says.
THE FUTURE OF CLOSET WORKS
Closet Works was recently sold into a private equity firm, Carson says, and in March the company acquired Crown Closets, a Las Vegas-based company.
"We're working together to continue to grow our businesses," Ferrigan says, "and we've been working with Cabinet Vision to take advantage of the technologies that are going to be there for us to get ourselves moved in the right direction and make this as efficient and professional organization as humanly possible."
Carson says the company has no plans on stopping. It has set its goals on becoming the national brand. "Over the next five years we'll organically grow and acquire companies across the country to be the biggest brand-name closet company in the country. That's a little modest, but we're jumping on it," he says.
What's one of the keys to achieving that goal? Carson says it is technology. "We can't do that without the technology we're talking about. There's no way we could efficiently run five regional manufacturing hubs without having world class software."
author: By Kim Kaiser