Signed Friday, Stocked Monday: The C&D Industrial Maintenance Story

About C&D Industrial Maintenance

Founded in 2018, C&D Industrial Maintenance is an owner-operated commercial and industrial maintenance company headquartered in Palmetto, Florida, with additional offices in Lakeland, FL and Chattanooga, TN.

The company repairs and maintains dock doors, compactors, balers, hollow metal doors, automatic doors, and gates for facilities across Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Missouri. C&D is ranked among the top commercial door dealers in the country and is IDA accredited, and its technicians are mobile, working out of trucks rather than a central shop.

The Challenge

Before Ply, C&D had no inventory or tracking system in place. "Before Ply it was very caveman age, I would say," says Logan Polk. Techs took their trucks home each day and were stocked with what they were expected to use, and reordering happened reactively, whenever someone called in low or out.

That lack of visibility came to a head when a batch of operators and stock got tied up in a scheduling conflict. C&D had them earmarked for one job, not realizing other jobs needed the same part, some of them at fire stations. Once those came in, they became the priority and pulled the stock as emergency work, leaving the originally scheduled customer without what they needed and forcing C&D to reorder. "It really kind of put us in a spot of we don't know how to track this stuff," Logan says. "We don't know what we need to keep on hand. We don't know the movement of the product."

C&D had actually been implementing a different software's inventory module first, hoping to avoid paying for a separate system. "We wanted to kind of look and see if this other system offered everything like they said they did," Logan says. It didn't hold up. The team had already interviewed and reviewed Ply beforehand and liked what they saw, so when the other system came up short, they made the switch.

We really had to jump in to the inventory system to kind of help save the day. There was really no other choice.

Logan Polk, C&D Industrial Maintenance

The Solution

Once C&D committed, the rollout moved fast. "We signed on Friday and Ply was here on Monday," Logan says, getting barcoding and warehouse team training underway almost immediately, even though the team would have preferred more lead time.

Ply's ability to handle special orders mattered immediately, especially with C&D's go-live on its dispatch and field service platform. Given how many door and dock package variations the business handles, special orders that don't come from a catalog are common. Without Ply, Logan says, the team "would have had to create that manually each time in the field service system."

Support carried through past setup. "The customer service level is beyond expectations," Logan says. "I probably haven't worked with any other company that's been so supportive." That included help cleaning up C&D's catalog, moving items between materials and consumables, and responding to functionality suggestions Logan raised along the way.

The inventory lens is Logan's favorite feature. "I love that you can see the inventory turns, by truck, by warehouse, as a whole, just as fleet or just as warehouses," Logan says. "There's not a lot of figuring out the formulas and getting with finance. It is literally all right there for you every single day."

A couple of years ago, a normal Tuesday meant reacting on memory: "Hey, do we have this in stock? I had it in my head that it's in the warehouse," Logan says. Today, an estimate pipeline shows what's moving, what's on hand, and what needs to stay stocked versus replenished, shifting the team from reactive to planned.

The Results

• Around $10,000 caught in incorrect supplier invoices, in just the first couple months. "We have already caught different variances where suppliers have sent bills," Logan says. "There has been, I think, two invoices I've come across that should have never been sent, and we caught those. If we didn't have Ply, we probably wouldn't have caught those."
• Ply paid for itself in a couple of months, by Logan's estimate, even while the team was still finishing rollout across trucks.
• Ordering time reduced, replacing manual status tags that were prone to human error with a direct feed from job to ordering system. "Now it just feeds right over," Logan says. "You can see it right away. You can action it right away."
• Less back-and-forth communication. The team no longer needs to call techs to check truck stock, and email traffic with customers has dropped since orders can be confirmed and tracked directly in the system.
• Reduced unnecessary reordering. Visibility into existing stock has surfaced items that had been sitting on the shelf for years and likely would have been reordered again. "Now having that visibility of it is allowing us to reduce that inventory cost, get it out without taking on extra cost."

Looking ahead, Logan expects C&D to roughly double in size over the next couple of years, adding trucks and warehouses across the Southeast, with a goal of growing from a $30 million company to a $100 million company within three years. Looking back at the decision to switch, Logan's only regret is not making it sooner: "I wish I would have been able to do it from the start, and it wasn't such a crisis decision."