Stepwise Manufacturing Corp is a solutions company able to provide a wide range of services, including creative consulting, system development, and platform integrations. We're a team of seasoned business leaders, marketers, and skilled developers. We've been on the front lines of growing businesses looking for relevance within existing markets while exploring new market opportunities. At Stepwise, we believe that in today's hyper-accelerated technology landscape, change is a fundamental requirement for business growth. But change alone, for the sake of change, is reckless. That's why we not only build and operate platforms for our business partners, but we also help them understand the change impact and their growth opportunities within the evolving technology landscape.
Our business and technology expertise includes financial, government, healthcare, transit, identity, retail, and small business. Let us know when you're ready for change.
YOUR BUSINESS HAS OUTGROWN SPREADSHEETS
At Stepwise, we believe that secure cloud services can overcome many business growth obstacles. Whether the challenge is consolidating data, process management, or even reducing response times for product approvals, a secure cloud solution provides unlimited connectivity options for employees, partners, and customers.
STEPWISE CAN PROVIDE A GREAT ALTERNATIVE
We know there are many companies selling you products and solutions. They all have technology with experienced people pushing their offers. What sets us apart is an unmatched commitment to customer satisfaction. At the end of the process, we hope you agree that working with us was one of your better business decisions. To achieve that, we start by listening. We aren't just good listeners; we're great listeners. And when dealing with technology, it's often difficult to articulate the nuances of your business. By listening to you, we can help ensure that what you want is what you need.
INSTEAD OF MAKING YOUR BUSINESS FIT OUR PRODUCTS
Is your business requirement unique? Not every platform comes in an off-the-shelf product package. And too often, the hosted solutions for a business application aren't extensible to the rest of your business. A Stepwise solution or platform module will be unique to you. It's what your business needs to stay relevant to today's market requirements while opening the door for tomorrow's growth.
Stepwise Manufacturing Corp is a global provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for our business customers. Our solutions include portal, web, and mobile applications, along with various business platforms, including Analytics, CRM, Order Management, and Project Scheduling. Each business customer solution resides within its own secure and operational domain (as opposed to a multi-tenant offering). This setup allows us to locate the customer's business solution at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center within the closest proximity to the customer's business operation.
Stepwise has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer secure cloud-based business hosting throughout the AWS Global Cloud network. AWS offers 55 Availability Zones within 18 geographic Regions around the world. Each AWS Region is isolated from other AWS Regions, providing the necessary security infrastructure to support in-country transactions (as needed by some financial and identity markets). This regional support enables Stepwise to provide high performance and availability local to our business customers without sacrificing security. The AWS data centers provide secure access to a variety of advanced system services, including reliable data archiving and recovery, blockchain, system scaling, identity management, AI, big data, AR/VR, and analytics.
Cloud computing is the delivery of computer services via the internet through one of three service models that are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
IaaS provides the fundamental building blocks of computing that include renting physical hardware and virtual servers for software development teams along with network engineers to create software products and services.
PaaS provides an integrated set of data management, analytics, and insight application development and management components offered as a platform the enterprise does not own or control (as defined by Forrester).
SaaS provides the delivery of applications as a service. Although performance and security are essential to the end-user, the underlying hardware infrastructure and operating system are irrelevant.
Integrated Components
Integrated Components are a set of reusable components leveraging the Amazon infrastructure. The elements can be quickly and securely incorporated into your business system, providing design flexibility that's not available from a strictly configurable ERP platform.
STEPWISE BUSINESS PLATFORMS
A Stepwise Business Platform can be a great addition or alternative to a full ERP migration or ERP implementation. With a Stepwise Business Platform, we can transform your spreadsheet driven operation to a secure cloud-based system, including integrated process management and real-time reporting. The Stepwise Business Platform reporting tools provide instant access to the metrics that drive your business, allowing you to quickly find out what (and who) is working, and what's not.
Our platform starts with Integrated Components enabling us to develop a broad range of solutions.
Customer requirements have helped shape the Integrated Components into our Platform Modules.
The Platform Modules are a set of consistent and reusable business “packages” that can readily be customized for your solution.
Your business solution is the combinational result of both our Integrated Components and current Platform Modules, creating a solution unique for your business.
Better than an off-the-shelf product, a Stepwise Business Platform solution is tailored to fit your business today and tomorrow.
ABOUT US
We're a team of experienced business leaders, marketers, and developers that understand how fast technology is changing our lives. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore suggested a doubling of chip technology every two years. Over 50 years later, Moore's doubling curve, known as Moore's Law, is only now slowing down. During that 50+ year timeframe, transistor count went from 2 to over 10 billion, the internet was born, and telephones became sophisticated mobile devices. Programming languages rapidly advanced from early Fortran, C, and Pascal to highly scalable scripting languages, including Node and React. And within the last 2-3 years, significant technology providers have significantly ramped up cloud capabilities. Leaders in this space include Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (Google Cloud Platform). According to Gartner, in 2018, AWS is the market leader with over 40% market share. Microsoft is second with 29%, and Google is trailing with just 3%.
We believe that by 2025, every business operation and product offering will, in some way, connect to the global internet. This connection includes business transactions, security, data transformation, analytics, identity management, IoT (internet of things), not to mention excellent opportunities with deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR). Three years ago, this would be a difficult and expensive challenge, but today we're able to securely leverage technology components readily made available within the cloud.
Change is coming. We are passionate about helping our business partners understand how change can impact their business future. And we're equally excited to help them build affordable solutions and platforms that ensure their current and future business relevance and success.
At Stepwise, we believe:
COVENEY INTERLAY
Coveney Interlay is a leading Australian supplier and installer of commercial floor coverings, including tile, carpeting, and vinyl. They are the preferred supplier to many of Melbourne's leading architects, interior designers, and builders; and provide project consultation, preparation solutions, and access to storage facilities during the construction projects.
With a successful business history of 25 years and over 350,000 square yards of flooring, they know their business. Their competitive market, like many, requires close management of costs throughout the business cycle. To manage costs, Coveney created numerous detailed product spreadsheets that consider all facets of product, labor, consumables, and overhead; while still providing the customer a fair price.
In the fall of 2017, the company became noticeably constrained by managing project orders and scheduling. Estimates required multiple reviews, and only a limited number of project managers were able to create them. Once complete, compiling the estimate with numerous external documents became a tedious manual exercise managing papers and folders. Multiple project schedules on a spreadsheet requires a single person to own and authorize every project change. In short, because of their success, the company had maxed out its current processes and knew it was time for a change.
The business was already using MYOB (an Australian BUSINESS FINANCIAL SYSTEM) and was looking for a tool to manage estimates, quotes, sales orders, and project scheduling. They explored various ERP systems and initially opted to go with Dynamics 365 but found the solution slow and clunky, subsequently deciding not to use it.
Coveney contacted Stepwise, and together we defined the initial customer solution. Obvious requirements were:
Specific to Coveney's business, they required a customizable product configurator front end for a minimum of 7 product lines. Besides, with up to 30 people that can take an order, they needed a way to manage the order flow with authorized approvals. Once an order was accepted, they wanted to create a quote automatically. Finally, an order management process needed to drive the work orders into production. After more discussion, we defined the detailed product specification that would work for them. Using Stepwise business modules, the Coveney team reviewed the first iteration.
With the early iteration, it was initially agreed to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tool for quote generation. The quotes would be automatically created as a part of the process flow, and the online web editor would allow the user to make edits to a cover letter or modifications to the quote detail. Ultimately, after trying the online editor, Coveney determined a WORD (Docx) editor to be a better choice because:
Had this been a typical ERP implementation, system changes (assuming they were possible) would have been costly. As it was, Stepwise was able to apply the changes quickly to the Stepwise business modules allowing the quotes to be automatically generated in WORD using pre-loaded templates.
Following system launch, Stepwise continues to support Coveney on an as-needed basis.
"We're delighted with the solution Stepwise delivered. Since our initial discussions with Stepwise, we've acquired another company and easily moved them over to the Stepwise platform without incurring additional costs." Nicholas Ficinus, CEO – Coveney Interlay