Customer story
How Lone Star turned two-week bids into same-day quotes
Lone Star Door & Hardware is a young Division 08 distributor supplying commercial doors, frames and hardware. When it opened, the team started out doing everything by hand, and the cost of that made the case for eMullion fast.
Lone Star Door & Hardware
Amit R. · Owner
2 weeks → 1 day
Bid turnaround, once pricing is loaded
- Trade
- Division 08: commercial doors, frames & hardware
- Based
- Texas, USA
- Owner
- Amit R.
- Prior experience
- Ran on eMullion at a previous firm
The company
A new distributor, and a veteran who wouldn't budge
Lone Star is a young distributor, but it didn't open short on experience. A 30-to-40-year industry veteran came on board with one condition: that the shop run on eMullion, and nothing else. For someone who had watched the trade's tools come and go for decades, it wasn't up for debate.
That lined up with what Amit already knew. He'd run on eMullion at a previous firm and seen what it could do, so betting a brand-new business on it wasn't the cautious, familiar choice, it was the one he trusted to carry the work from day one.
The challenge
Running the whole job by hand
When Lone Star first opened, the team ran without software. Takeoff, pricing and ordering across frames, doors and hardware were all manual, which meant repetitive work, more room for mistakes, and slow coordination between the moving parts of every job.
A single bid could take two weeks of daily work. And because nothing tracked what had already been released, there was no guard against ordering the same item twice, one of the quietest, costliest errors in a hand-run process.
What it cost
~2 weeks
to turn around a single bid, by hand
All manual
takeoff, pricing and ordering: repetitive and error-prone
No tracking
nothing flagged what had shipped, so items got ordered twice
Inside eMullion
The whole pipeline, at a glance
Open bids, win-loss and awarded value sit on one dashboard, so instead of digging through spreadsheets, Amit can see what's out, what's landed, and push the next quote straight back out.
- Open bids, win-loss and awarded value in one view
- Every bid tracked from quote through to the decision
- No spreadsheet archaeology to see where a job stands
What changed on eMullion
Four things Amit felt right away
- 01
Bids in a day instead of two weeks
The biggest shift is speed. A bid that used to take two weeks of daily work now goes out in a day. Once pricing is loaded, Amit estimates straight from structured data instead of rebuilding every line by hand.
- 02
No more double-ordering
eMullion's project-management module tracks what has already been released, so the team doesn't accidentally order the same frame, door or hardware set twice, exactly the mistake the old manual process couldn't catch.
- 03
Submittals: load, detail, print, done
What used to be a drawn-out task is now short and repeatable. The submittal package comes out of the job itself rather than being rebuilt from scratch each time.
- 04
The one feature he couldn't live without: the import
Every architect formats their door schedule differently, but eMullion works from one consistent import structure. Amit normalises whatever a project hands him into that format, pastes it in and verifies the fields. It's the feature he says he couldn't do without, and the biggest cut to manual entry.
“eMullion has been around a long time and knows what it's doing, and you're not just a number on a list.”
Would they recommend it
What Amit tells other distributors
It's proven.
eMullion has been in the trade a long time and clearly knows what it's doing.
It works for newer businesses.
Amit valued the financial flexibility eMullion extended to a young distributor still finding its feet.
You're not a number on a list.
He can pick up the phone and reach someone directly: real, personal support, not a ticket queue.
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