From No System to Real Numbers: The Coppertown Plumbing Story

About Coppertown Plumbing

Coppertown Plumbing was established in 2017 by Marjorie Solano and Arturo Soto, an entrepreneur and a plumber with decades of experience who partnered on a shared vision for top-notch residential and commercial plumbing service.

Based in Homestead, Florida with a second office in Key Largo, the state-licensed and insured company serves Homestead, Florida City, Cutler Bay, Kendall, Pinecrest, Palmetto Bay, Coral Gables, Ocean Reef, and the Florida Keys. Coppertown handles the full range of residential and commercial plumbing, from building out entire plumbing systems to fixture installation and repair, water heaters, and water filtration and softener services.

The Challenge

Before Ply, Coppertown had no inventory system at all. "Before, it used to be just let's order, let's have a stock, let's pull from the stock and take it into a job," Marjorie says. Ordering ran on spreadsheets and day-to-day guesswork, and the team specifically struggled to find software built for a plumbing business rather than general retail inventory. "We had to find something that would integrate both plumbing and something that catered to our clients, plus that it was easy for our employees and for us to learn."

Emergencies exposed the gap the most. "It was probably having someone call us and say, we have an emergency, we need to get an item," Marjorie says. That meant calling around to different suppliers to find who had the part in stock, sending someone to pick it up, and then getting it to the job site, all before the work could even start.

Bringing in new software wasn't an easy decision for Marjorie personally. "My biggest hesitation was learning something new. I am very old school," she says. Her team felt the same uncertainty at first. "Our first reaction, even for myself, was we're going to fail," Marjorie says. "But in reality we're already failing because we didn't have a system in place."

The Solution

With Ply in place, dispatch now checks stock automatically. "Someone calls us and says, okay, we need a garbage disposal installed. Our dispatch automatically goes into Ply, sees hey, we have this type of garbage disposal in stock, which one would you prefer, this is our cost, this is our price," Marjorie says. On the construction side, techs review what's been ordered and pick up exactly what they need each morning before heading out.

Support took some adjusting to but delivered. "The support team has been really good," Marjorie says. "They kind of calm you, and then they give you different scenarios on how it should be done... they give you articles on how to do the items that you want to do, how to change it." Coppertown also built its own reference book pairing Ply's inventory system with technician training to help the field team catch up to speed.

Marjorie's favorite feature is how Ply connects to the rest of the business. "It integrates with our accounting program, it integrates with our customer program," she says. "It's not just inventory, it's the client, it's the accounting. Because of that, it allows us to be more efficient at everything we do."

The Results

• Immediate visibility into inventory value from month one. Coppertown didn't have a real number on how much inventory it was carrying until it finished cataloging everything in Ply. "As soon as we finished our inventory and putting all our items in, we already knew an amount of inventory that we had, which at first we had no idea," Marjorie says.
• Restocking is now the main time investment, not sourcing. With ordering and stock visibility handled in Ply, the remaining effort is the physical labor of putting items away, rather than tracking down what's needed or where to get it.
• Real numbers where there were none before. Since going live in December, Coppertown has had visibility into inventory data it simply didn't track previously. "We have numbers that we did not have before," Marjorie says. "It tells us a lot of what we've done and what we can do now with the program."
• Faster response on emergency and service calls. What used to mean calling multiple suppliers and dispatching someone to pick up parts is now a quick stock check inside Ply before heading straight to the job.

Looking ahead, Coppertown is working toward opening a retail storefront within the next year, using the inventory visibility Ply gives them to expand beyond internal jobs and serve walk-in customers directly.

Anybody in the blue collar business should be doing it... you have to have a hold of your inventory. I think it makes you a little bit more monitoring of what you have and don't have, and at the same time it makes you efficient. Time is money, and it has saved us a lot of time.

Marjorie Solano, Owner, Coppertown Plumbing