From Chaos to Clarity - Part 2: The Kyle Plumbing Story Continues

Read Part 1: From Chaos to Clarity: The Kyle Plumbing Story

About Kyle Plumbing

Kyle Plumbing has served Broward and Palm Beach County since 1993, with roots in South Florida plumbing tracing back to 1974 through its Sam Jolley's Plumbing lineage. The company is a Florida State-Certified Plumbing Contractor, BBB A+ accredited since 2001, and handles both residential and commercial work across Deerfield Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and the surrounding area. Kevin Couper bought Kyle Plumbing about three years ago.

The Challenge

Before Ply, Kyle Plumbing had no real internal inventory process. "It was really phone calls or emails to the vendors directly, maybe sometimes text messages," Kevin says. "There was no internal process of the inventory. It was an inventory person. Their process was in their brain." Purchase orders and vendor conversations lived scattered across one person's desktop, and the warehouse itself had no real count of what was on the shelves. "We had a lot of stuff, but it wasn't really tracked."

That lack of visibility surfaced in a costly way. Walking the warehouse, Kevin's team found roughly $45,000 in excess, returnable equipment from plumbing construction jobs, items ordered in error, leftover from change orders, or simply excess. It wasn't a single discovery either. "We found it was about a $15,000 return three separate times over the course of three months," Kevin says. "That's a lot of space, a lot of money, obviously, and it's just wasted." The company ultimately consolidated from two warehouses down to one as a direct result.

Bringing in new software carried its own risk. "One of my biggest hesitations in general with bringing in a new software is, are they going to do what they said they're going to do?" Kevin says. Being locked into a long contract with no way out was a bigger concern than the software itself. Ply came with no contract and no strings attached, and delivered from the start. "Right from the get-go, they did what they said they were going to do," Kevin says. "Their customer service is top-notch, which is honestly one of the best things, because communication's huge."

The Solution

Getting technicians to actually use the system took a few tries. The team first rolled out a phone app for scanning items used on jobs, but adoption sat around 30%, and even then, techs weren't scanning everything. Scanning from a price book instead ran into the same problem. The fix was to remove the manual step entirely: the team now runs on a flat-rate price book where standard materials for a given job, like a water heater install, are automatically deducted from the truck the moment that job is sold. "Once they hit that button and it sells, those items come right off their truck and they don't have to do anything," Kevin says. "We have full transparency into job costing without even lifting a finger."

Onboarding itself took real effort up front. Ply's team spent several days on-site working through the warehouse item by item, assigning each one a name, a picture, and an aisle location. That process surfaced a surprise: "We identified in that first week that we had over 1,400 parts in our warehouse, which is absurd," Kevin says. Despite the volume, the training itself was simple.

I can train anyone to use the iPad to learn how to use Ply for inventory counting purposes in five minutes.

Kevin Couper, Owner at Kyle Plumbing

Kevin's favorite feature ties directly to protecting margin. Rather than relying on industry-average pricing the way some price book providers do, Ply links directly to the actual parts and prices they buy from their own vendors, updating daily. "We thought it was extremely important to actually link to the parts that we're buying at our price for our vendor in our market, versus some average somewhere else," Kevin says. He also relies heavily on equipment tracking to see inventory value and location at a glance, making it easy to adjust the warehouse's mix of parts in minutes rather than guessing.

The system has also simplified tasks well outside daily job costing. Insurance renewal, previously a headache, now takes about 30 seconds: "I log in, and in 30 seconds we print off a list of inventory with the entire list, the codes, and the approximate costs per quantity, and then the equipment as well with serial numbers, model numbers, and everything," Kevin says. The same visibility helps when technicians leave or join the company, giving the team a clear picture of what a tech has, what they're missing, and what needs to be restocked before their next shift.

The Results

• Material cost dropped from about 20% to about 13.5%. "Before I used Ply, our material cost was about 20%. Now after Ply I can confidently say it's about 13 and a half percent on average," Kevin says. By his own estimate, that translates to roughly $50,000 a year in savings on about $1 million in annual material spend, on top of other efficiency gains. "It's really a no-brainer as far as it pays for itself a hundredfold," he says.
• Two warehouses became one, after visibility into excess and misallocated inventory made the second location unnecessary.
• Inventory is no longer something Kevin has to think about day to day. "If we're low on materials, we already know we're low on materials, whether it's in the warehouse or in the trucks," he says. "There's no more running around like crazy. We're always caught up."
• Only three people touch the system: Kevin, his warehouse manager, and the company’s new CFO, who handles purchase orders and job costing. The tool stays simple without adding overhead.

Looking back, Kevin's one piece of advice to himself wasn't about the software. It was about staffing it correctly from the start. "I actually had to go through three separate warehouse managers just to have any inkling of tech-savviness to be able to manage it," he says. Once the right person was in place, the system ran itself: "It's not hard at all. It's just finding the right mindset of somebody that understands how to use the technology."