Customer story: Falkbuilt

How Falkbuilt went from 0 to $1.3 million in interior construction project revenue in under a year using monday.com

Meet Falkbuilt Ltd.

Falkbuilt is an interior construction company based in Calgary, Alberta, with over 50 branches spread across North America and Asia. The team builds quick and cost-effective interior solutions such as doors, window frames, and walls for healthcare, education, and commercial spaces worldwide.

Falkbuilt has a 90,000 sq ft. (8361 sq. m) factory with a $250 million a year production capacity. Manufacturing is split into four production cells: steel, aluminum, custom wood, and metal.

With their main office, the “Falknest” as it is known, situated in the factory floor center, the team is able to oversee all operations from its core. Each team at Falkbuilt is cross-functional, all working together towards a common goal: to support the branch requests, from concept to delivery.

The challenge

As a young company, their biggest initial challenge was figuring out how to get its project requests from the main office to the production floor, involve the right people at the right time; and track the process through each stage to completion.

That’s when they brought on Allie Swindlehurt, as their operations manager. She needed to figure out how to connect the main office and the production floor in a way that would allow them to not only work quickly and efficiently but also have information flow easily between the main office and factory floor.

“We’re not a traditional construction company, so we needed a nontraditional solution to get the ball rolling. In the beginning, I looked into traditional construction project management software like Buildertrend. But the software was either too robust in the wrong areas or were very limited in terms of what it could do,” says Allie.

Falkbuilt needed a flexible Work OS solution that would allow the teams to tailor the platform to their exact needs. This predicament had Allie circling back to monday.com which Falkbuilt had already implemented, but hadn’t taken full advantage of yet.

Falkbuilt had never really considered monday.com as a potential overarching solution for the company’s workflow challenges until Allie came along.

The solution

Building a seamless workflow

“Our remote pricing team was already using monday.com to track pricing requests in a relatively simple way. From there, I looked at how I could amplify what they already created and figure out how to use monday.com to pull some of the information they were tracking into later stages of the process," says Allie.

After watching several webinars and exploring useful monday.com features, Allie began building the workflow, starting with the pricing board revamp. It immediately had an impact.

1. From branch representatives to pricing team

The branch sends a request and the pricing team reviews. Once Falkbuilt wins the project, the pricing team can assign a project execution team directly from the board to begin, which kicks off the whole process.

Unlike most companies, Falkbuilt uses colors to identify each project execution team (Red team, Blue team, Green team, Orange team, etc.). Each of these teams contains one or more project managers, designers, and modelers.

2. From the pricing team to designers

All project execution teams work from the same board but have a custom Table View so they see only the information relevant to them. All preliminary project information such as the branch details, project portal, project site details, and project tags are all pulled from the pricing request board into the design board.

Once the project manager receives the information, they review the project details, including the design specs, and assigns their designer. The designer will then take the preliminary design that the branch sent over and draw it in their design software.

"Tracking this process in monday.com also makes it easy for our designers to keep the clients up-to-date in real-time during the initial stages," says Allie.

3. From designers to production prep

Once the client approves the design, the project details move to the production board. This action prompts the modeler to start digitizing the design in their 3D modeling software. The modeler takes the designs and turns it into actual production information required to run the project through the production floor.

4. From production prep to production

“If there's an update, issue, or question, the factory leads can comment and tag the relevant team member. For example, if a program is wrong, they can tag the modeler, and so on.

We've even implemented a preemptive notification system where if there's some custom production required in a specific item, the project manager writes a note in an update and tags the work orders to refer to that custom instructions note. This gives the production floor team all the information they need to produce that piece properly.” says Allie.

Finally, when they finish producing all the components and are ready to be shipped, the factory team drops the skids off in the shipping area.

5. From production to shipping

Once the production team finishes, the shipping coordinator is notified that the components are ready for shipping. They then ship the components to their destination and notify the team on-site to get ready for assembly.

6. From shipping to building

The branches have build teams at each of their locations, but will often request to have a technician sent over from HQ to assist the team on site.

During the design process, once the project manager determines if a technician is required, they change a status on their board that creates a new item in another board called ‘ tech schedule’ and links it back to the design board using mirrored columns.

The team lead then assigns the technician and this is where they track the installation progress. Involving the technician earlier on in the process keeps them informed and in the loop, allowing them to get ready for the build on site.

"Our technicians are often out on raw construction sites with only a mobile connection. monday.com gives them instant access to the project information they need and makes connecting with the team at HQ easy," says Allie.

"We increased our project capacity significantly in a few months, and a large part is thanks to the 40,000+ human actions we save each month with automations."

Allie Swindlehurst

Falker (Operations), Falkbuilt Ltd.

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