Pioneer Cladding & Glazing Systems

The work

Pioneer Cladding & Glazing Systems is an exterior façade contractor specializing in custom unitized curtain wall, headquartered in Mason, Ohio, with production shops in Mason and Baltimore and engineering offices in Kokomo and Johnson City. KimbleLabs partnered with Pioneer to bridge the gap between ComputerEase and the rest of the business — pulling project, budget, and productivity data out of ComputerEase, landing it in Zoho CRM as structured tables, and surfacing it through shop-level dashboards that finance and shop leadership can act on without re-keying numbers from ComputerEase reports.

The Challenge

Pioneer's project and productivity data was locked inside ComputerEase, and ComputerEase itself was only accessible from a single on-premise laptop — no cloud surface, no API, no clean way to share a current view of project health with the people who needed it: shop foremen, project managers, and leadership. Reporting meant pulling exports or asking finance to run queries, and the reporting stack leaned heavily on people and spreadsheets.

For a project-driven contractor, timing matters. When a labor-hour budget drifts or a shop falls behind its productivity target, leadership needs to see it during the month — not at month-end, when the chance to adjust has passed.

The KimbleLabs Solution

KimbleLabs worked with Pioneer across Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics to build a reliable bridge between ComputerEase and the people who need to act on the data. The build focused on three things: getting the data out of ComputerEase reliably, modeling it correctly inside Zoho, and surfacing it in dashboards that map to how Pioneer's shops actually work.

• A custom connection to an on-premise ERP: Because ComputerEase was only reachable from a single on-prem laptop, the project started with the data-access problem. KimbleLabs built a custom ODBC connection that exposes ComputerEase to a managed integration tool — and it carried through ComputerEase's later move to a dedicated VM with a driver update rather than a rebuild.
• Detail and trend tables modeled to match the work: The ComputerEase data was modeled in Zoho CRM as two paired tables — a detail table for the current state of every project cost code, and a trend table that captures the same data over time. Budget, hours, and units follow ComputerEase's cost-code convention, so the numbers match what the project teams already know. The trend table is what makes "how is this pacing this week vs. last week" a question Pioneer can answer.
• Change-order-resilient date handling: KimbleLabs worked through ComputerEase's date-field behavior — including the case where editing a change order can re-stamp a transaction's posting date — so the trend report doesn't shift historic data when an old change order is edited.
• Shop dashboards with productivity targets: Shop-level dashboards were built for headquarters and then expanded to cover other shops. Shop leadership can see how each shop is tracking against its target without waiting for finance, with the productivity ratio plotted against a budget threshold so the chart is readable from the floor — including by team members who don't read English.

Results

The biggest wins are operational rather than headline metrics, but they show up in how the team works week to week.

• Project budget data visible without a query through the detail and trend tables, instead of waiting on a ComputerEase export.
• Shop productivity at a glance through the Mason and Baltimore dashboards, with productivity targets shop leadership — and shop teams themselves — can check from the floor.
• Trend reporting that doesn't drift, through date-field logic that handles change-order edits without re-stamping historic transactions.