Manage FF&E specification, procurement, and product data at scale. Take on bigger projects with confidence and grow your firm with  Fohlio. Schedule a demo or book a consultation with one of our account managers to explore these features today.

We sat down with Kristin Claire of Contract Interiors, LLC to help us understand how their firm uses Fohlio in their day-to-day operations. 

Design, Procurement, and Contracting for Senior Living Communities

Contract Interiors, LLC was founded in 1998 in Salem, Oregon, with vast experience providing design and contracting services in over 30 states throughout the U.S. Their focus is to provide value to owners and operators through a collaborative approach delivering quality products, outstanding service and attention to detail.

With over 15 years working closely with owners, operators, and developers of senior living communities, they have built honest relationships and continuously provide outstanding customer service. 

Kristin’s Role and Day-to-Day Responsibilities

I’m in Fohlio 80% of my day. We build a budget in Excel just for ease of using our V look up table. Once a budget is approved, it then gets imported into Fohlio. Create a project, budget numbers, items that need to be specified. When I go into ordering, I use the clipper to encode products we want to order. I import from our current library if we have ordered them before. We then go into the purchase order tab.

Balancing Uniqueness and Efficiency in Procurement

The procurement side of Contract Interiors specifies things from the beginning to the end of their design & procurement firm’s projects. For them, every project isn’t like a hotel chain where everything is cut & paste. With a focus on senior living, the firm has different design fields up and down the coast. Every building may follow a certain style, but generally they are unique to the location.

The procurement team needed a way to track and streamline design specifications and procurement items for multiple locations and phases of design and procurement. Before Fohlio, they cycled between vendor webpages, Quickbooks, multiple Excel sheets, and emails to manage data.

Streamlining Specification, Procurement, and Order Tracking

“PO writing and creation have been the biggest saver for us, as well as just being able to specify the product.” 

Specifications: The webclipper and product library allow the team to use the manufacturer website pages they browse to grab data directly from each page and populate the Fohlio product library. This automatically generates cutsheets and specifications with the details & photos clipped from the websites.

PO & Quote Creation: After specification data is entered, PO’s and quotes can be generated from the data eliminating the need to enter data into another sheet again and avoiding errors. 

Order Tracking: What once was a manual spreadsheet that procurement would send to the design team, is now a module within Fohlio that can be shared in real time amongst multiple departments. 

Moodboards: Data from the product library can be laid out onto Fohlio’s moodboard to use for project presentations.

Integrating Fohlio Into Contract Interiors’ Workflow

Contract Interiors used Excel, copying and pasting into multiple sheets, to do all their procurement work before adopting Fohilo. Transitioning from multiple files into one new program, they wanted to do everything in Fohlio. Onboarding and training with the Fohlio team allowed them to start by importing the data from excel files and populating the product library. They could immediately do the specifications and PO creation through Fohlio.

After 2 years, 100% of their projects are in Fohlio and there are future plans to integrate their accounting system and budgeting systems with Fohlio. 

Manage FF&E specification, procurement, and product data at scale. Take on bigger projects with confidence and grow your firm with  Fohlio. Schedule a demo or book a consultation with one of our account managers to explore these features today.