Customer story
How Jameson Supply left Excel behind for sharper submittals
Jameson Supply is an established Division 08 distributor supplying commercial doors, frames and hardware. For years the team estimated every job in Excel, until they went looking for something built for the trade, compared the options, and switched to eMullion for the fit, the support, and the sharper, more consistent submittals it turns out.
Jameson Supply
Becky B. · Operations Manager
One format, every bid
Consistent, detailed submittals in place of drifting spreadsheets
- Trade
- Division 08: commercial doors, frames & hardware
- Role
- Becky B., Operations Manager
- Switched from
- Excel
- Why eMullion
- The most personal support of the options they tried
The company
Years in Excel, and a search for a better fit
Jameson Supply handles commercial door, frame and hardware work the way most distributors do: bid by bid, opening by opening. For years that happened in Excel, with each estimate built by hand from a blank sheet. It worked, but it leaned hard on the person doing it, and on remembering how the last job had been put together.
So the team went looking for software, and trialled several options, most of which felt the same, formatted alike and hard to tell apart. What set eMullion apart wasn't a feature list; it was the support: when they had a question or a suggestion, they could get a real person on the line quickly.
The challenge
Keeping every bid consistent in Excel
Running estimating in Excel meant rebuilding every bid from a blank sheet. The hardest part wasn't any single calculation. It was keeping everything consistent from one job to the next, and generating product and bill-of-material lists by hand each time.
That manual, spreadsheet-driven process left room for the quiet errors that creep into hand-keyed work, and made it hard to turn out a submittal that looked the same, and held up, every time.
What it cost
~A day a bid
of manual input, every estimate rebuilt by hand in Excel
User errors
quiet mistakes slipping through hand-keyed bids
Drifting submittals
each job formatted its own way, hard to keep consistent
Inside eMullion
The same structured start, every bid
Instead of a blank spreadsheet, every job opens as the same structured bid, with the same fields filled the same way, so the takeoff, pricing and submittal that follow all come off one consistent record.
- One structured intake for every job
- Takeoff, pricing and submittals built off the same record
- The same format from the first field to the final package
What changed on eMullion
What got sharper for Becky's team
- 01
One consistent format, every bid
The win Becky points to first isn't speed. It's consistency. Every submittal now comes out of the same structured format, instead of each spreadsheet drifting its own way, so the package looks the same and holds up from one job to the next.
- 02
A more detailed product out the door
On bigger, more complex jobs the team actually puts more in, but what comes back is a far more detailed submittal. They're trading a little input for a noticeably better package for the customer.
- 03
Fewer user errors
Because the job is structured rather than hand-keyed, eMullion heads off a lot of the quiet mistakes a spreadsheet lets through, one of the changes Becky values most.
- 04
And it's quicker, too
The quality gain didn't cost time. It saved it. A mid-sized bid that used to take about a day of input now runs Becky's team around three to four hours.
“There's a bit of a learning curve, but once you get those things down it's definitely user-friendly. The support has been great, it prevents a lot of user error, and it gives us a better product to turn around.”
Would they recommend it
What Becky tells other distributors
Compare the field first.
Jameson trialled several systems and most looked alike. eMullion stood out for fitting how a distributor actually works, and for support that answers when you reach out.
It cuts user error.
The structure catches the slips a spreadsheet can't, so the work that leaves the door is cleaner.
Expect a short learning curve.
There are a few tips and tricks that aren't obvious at first, but once the team had them down it was genuinely user-friendly, and the submittals got better for it.
Explore eMullion
Jump to any module
Ready when you are
See eMullion on your own jobs
A 45-minute demo walks your takeoff, pricing and submittals through the software, with your catalogs, not a canned deck.
HM door + frame · HW-12