Dant Clayton


Case Studies

Dant Clayton improves information velocity with AllCloud and Salesforce

The leader in stadium design and manufacturing, Dant Clayton, provides customers with comprehensive design solutions and unmatched value-added consulting for over 40 years. They chose to partner with AllCloud to strengthen the company’s innovative solutions for all their customers’ stadium needs. They picked Salesforce for its industry leading technology to meet their immediate needs and felt AllCloud was the ideal partner for implementation and solving their business challenges. The goal was to increase process automation and real-time reporting capabilities to deliver better user experience and improved data insight. Given the desired increase in scalable projects, Dant Clayton used Salesforce to gain a 360° view of the business using real-time data and to increase business and sales productivity. This resulted in strong collaborations across functions, better insight into business operations and a significant reduction of revenue leakage. 

Gaining real-time insights to maximize production

A great stadium experience today, generates the fans of tomorrow. In today’s world, where sporting events are recovering from closure, Dant Clayton, which also functions as a construction firm, is focused even more on delivering comfort, durability and aesthetics for returning fans. Building the stadiums and parks of the future, Dant Clayton is leading the way with best-in-class bleacher and stadium systems. 

To overcome sudden changes in the industry, Dant Clayton realized it needed to transform the way they operated to support changing business goals. It became critical for the firm to centrally track all operations by integrating data into its processes. 

Dant Clayton lacked visibility into the pipeline and the ability to forecast production hours. The legacy use of spreadsheets for pricing and drawing requests hindered the sales reps, resulting in data and revenue loss. Customization and ease of use across user groups (from sales reps to management to preconstruction services groups and production planning) was a key reason in selecting Salesforce. They were also looking for an open API and the ability to easily connect with a wide-range of software technologies currently in use and those slated in the long term.

AllCloud became the ideal Salesforce partner, having the expertise, knowledge, and successful implementations of API integrations. With its experienced technical team, AllCloud clearly understood the business requirements and provided a solution that Dant Clayton easily could comprehend and use. Dant Clayton had a good understanding of forecasting hours for projects they won, however, they lacked visibility into the potential impact there would be for the hours in the open pipeline.

To be set up for success, Dant Clayton required a central information system that would enhance reporting capabilities, ease the process for sales reps to submit drawing and pricing requests, and have the ability to forecast production hours. 

Empowering users with an agile data intelligence system

Dant Clayton turned to AllCloud and Salesforce to support their business strategy for an all-encompassing system. The team chose Salesforce for its customizable and user-friendly tools for a diverse user group after vetting similar organizations. With AllCloud, Dant Clayton was impressed by their deep Salesforce expertise and business-led approach and felt confident that AllCloud could tackle these issues and ensure Dant Clayton was using Salesforce to optimize change in the organization. As well, AllCloud has been a trusted advisor since 2019, helping Dant Clayton solve their complex business needs. Having a deep understanding of their business and the requirements needed to create an agile system on budget and on time – made this partnership the ideal choice. 

AllCloud understood that saving time in the process was key to driving efficiency and higher business outcomes. To do this, a revised request form was created in Salesforce to track drawing and pricing requests and an automation was created to keep all parties notified along each applicable step. A seamless method was implemented where when a sales rep creates the request form, managers are automatically notified, and when managers assign designers and estimators, the sales reps are notified of who the individuals are. When the work is complete, the sales rep is notified again, creating a transparent and fluid working stream and increasing productivity.  By specifically providing the ability to leverage validation rules, multi-select picklists, email alerts and automated field updates, sales reps, designers, estimators and managers now have more efficient workflows.

Another challenge was to figure out how to feather the hours over a 9-week span for the production hours and creatively produce it in Salesforce. AllCloud knew that by incorporating the production hour forecasting, Dant Clayton could gain a deeper understanding of hours needed to effectively plan for each project. To do this, AllCloud built a custom solution using the Flow Builder that would take the estimated number of production hours for different lines of products. From there a standardized timeline was created to apply to all projects for forecasting purposes. Users could now input the total number of hours, and the Flow would run automatically and recalculate the forecasted production hours over time. 

An added benefit for Dant Clayton was the ability to report on the completion rate by designer and estimator. By creating a dashboard to display the average number of days ahead or behind schedule, Dant Clayton could view the work of each designer and estimator. AllCloud then facilitated the implementation of its key features and built and tested it to help onboard Dant Clayton’s 40 users. 

The next step for Dant Clayton is to continue improving their reporting from a sales management and rep standpoint and having other lines of business moved into the system. It’s also imperative for the company to further integrate Salesforce into other areas of the business to eliminate time inefficiencies and human error from the current processes.

“AllCloud truly understands our business. Consistently bringing innovative ways to improve and streamline our use of Salesforce, and subsequently our business, which has helped avoid potential system breakdowns and save time and money.”

Amanda Caufield, Director Of Marketing & Sales Operations, Dant Clayton 

Results: Providing data visibility with more accuracy and speed 

Consolidating data into one centralized application transformed the way Dant Clayton viewed their production and processes and predicted future growth of the company. The biggest win was in a 99% reduction in revenue leakage and lost data as it relates to pricing and drawing requests. Having real-time accessibility of data has ensured that the business stays on top of bid date deliverables, avoiding a miss on multimillion dollar projects. The reporting is now accessible to both management and sales reps, providing them with a close view of important data through analytical dashboards.

For the first time ever, there was an increase in collaboration across the workforce, specifically between sales and operations. With its intuitive use and quick access to data insights, there was an increase in the adoption rate of CRM system users, leading to 75% improved visibility into Dant Clayton’s employees. It has given sales reps more time to prioritize their tasks with a time saving of 20%. This has led to a 60% increase in sales management efficiency.

By shedding insight into the health of the business, Dant Clayton is now able to make more intelligent business decisions deeply rooted on facts rather than on assumptions, when having conversations on the business’s current state and future outlook.