Vilno crew checking an aluminium profile
Customer story // Sheet metal / roofing

How Vilno doubled their daily orders with Factory

KS
A conversation with
Kendall Staats · Vilno Group
Challenge

Every order hand-drawn, three times over

Before Factory, the group spent huge amounts of time processing and logging orders and liaising with customers. Everything was paper based, with a lot of double handling and plenty of room for human error.

Every item was hand-drawn onto carbon-copy paper - one copy for the office, one for production, one for the customer - and priced by hand with a calculator. Drawing and entering fifty orders a day from a scribbled email, with a ruler and a pen, left a lot of room for mistakes.

The front office at Vilno
The front office - where every order used to be drawn out by hand
Solution

Collaborate changed how the shop talks

Now the drawing tools in Collaborate are used all the time, and the whole team can see the conversation history on an order instead of relying on post-it notes stuck to the front of a job.

When something changes - a pickup becomes a delivery - the right person gets tagged and actions it. No more rewriting a whole order or liquid-papering three pages to make one change.

Planning the day at the whiteboard
Planning the day in one place - the shop talks through the job now
"The Collaborate feature is a game changer, and it is mind blowing to remember how we previously did things."
- Kendall Staats, Vilno Group
Results

Twice the orders, same shop

Before and after
25 orders a day50 orders a day

Factory took the group from a maximum of twenty-five orders a day to at least fifty, without adding staff. Tagging the right person through Collaborate has halved the time from start to finish, and taken a lot of stress out of the day.

Spiral duct and sheet-metal work on the racks
Duct and sheet-metal work heading out - now at twice the daily order rate
"The time alone that Factory has saved us is incomparable. We went from a maximum of 25 orders a day to at least 50. How did we even function before Factory?"
- Kendall Staats, Vilno Group
Vilno's story

A Sydney manufacturing group since 1980

Vilno Group is a family-owned manufacturing business in Sydney making locally-made products across the roofing, construction, cable-hauling and high-pressure hose safety industries.

The group spans several ventures: Roofing Accessories, a long-running commercial roofing and flashing manufacturer; Roof Razor, patented insulation spacers for metal roofs distributed nationally; National Cable Grips, producing cable stockings and hose restraints with a global reach; and Exact Metal Stamping, running long-run stamped products and components with pressing up to 100 tonnes.

1980
Founded, Sydney
40
On the floor
4 ventures
Under one group
100T
Stamping capacity
The Factory moment

No program did the whole job

There was no tool out there that would draw everything, work out the calculations and give back a combined cost. If it was not done manually and by hand, it was not done.

Without Factory, the group could not handle the workload it takes on now - it would have meant hiring more people just to keep up. Factory took that pressure off.

How Vilno uses Factory

Day to day

01

Draw and mark up orders with the Collaborate tools, every day.

02

See the full conversation history with a customer on each order.

03

Tag the right team member so a change gets actioned, not lost.

04

Let dispatch know the moment an order moves from pickup to delivery.

05

Keep office, production and dispatch working from the same order.

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