Rabine Group’s first company, Rabine Paving, started in 1981 as a residential paving company servicing Northern Illinois. Powered by professional accountability, a passion for the industry, and the drive to deliver an unrivalled quality of service to customers, Gary Rabine’s modest business expanded and grew to eventually become Rabine Group — a national leader in comprehensive solutions for commercial paving, roofing, snow removal, and petroleum transportation.
Still family-owned and family-operated, Rabine Group now boasts over 300 internal employees and a large coalition of certified partners. Rabine Group frequently provides their gold-standard services and labor to local and national commercial real estate owners including some of the largest national big box stores.
Magentrix opened a whole new world for us and our partners. Now, we can envision a system where everything is online and our partners basically live inside our portal.
Joe Stolz, Systems Automation Manager at Rabine Group
Business Challenge
Given the size and scope of Rabine Group’s operations, Rabine receives a large volume of contracts and work order requests. To fulfill work order requests, Rabine Group posts potential opportunities to their certified partners and allows them to bid on the contract.
Bids from the certified partners came in through multiple methods and formats — from verbal proposals to emails with spreadsheet attachments — with inconsistent or missing information. Without a focused bidding solution, Rabine had to dedicate valuable human resources to manually collating and consolidating bids. "It wasn't unusual for our employees to work overtime and occasionally pull all-nighters to process the bids," said Joe Stolz, Systems Automation Manager at Rabine Group.
Requirements
With no automated system to handle partner bids and seeing an opportunity to improve and upgrade their existing systems, Rabine began searching for a platform that allowed them to manage the bidding process. Rabine Group outlined several key requirements for their ideal solution:
Customizable and Scalable
The platform needed to be flexible, both in design and in infrastructure. Rabine wanted full control over their bidding environment so that they could constantly adjust and improve the system for their large user base.
Quick Time-to-market
The faster Rabine could develop and deploy a bidding platform, the faster they could resolve the disproportionate allocation of human resources. A lengthy development time meant further losses due to inefficiency and error in the manual bidding process.
Ease of Use
A solution that could be easily adopted by both Rabine administrators and certified partner users was a major requirement. Intuitive design and exceptional support from the platform and its provider were considered crucial to minimize time investment in training and onboarding.
Integration with Salesforce
The solution would have to integrate with Rabine's instance of Salesforce CRM so that information remained centralized and accessible.
The Magentrix Solution
After considering a number of potential solutions, the Rabine Group chose Magentrix because it met or exceeded all of the requirements without punching a significant hole in Rabine’s budget. Magentrix was willing to commit a depth of support along with platform flexibility that other solutions could not match.
Rabine and Magentrix began portal development in early December and by the end of that very same month, Rabine launched the partner portal and received their first official partner bid online. The adoption obstacles and difficulties were smoothed out quickly, and soon Rabine’s employees were excited and enthusiastic about their new portal tool - no more all-nighters!
Stolz notes that Rabine Group already have "a 90% adoption rate of the new partner portal and a significant improvement to the turnaround for quotes and contracts."
Magentrix continues to work with Rabine to improve their current portal and to develop new web applications as well. Going forward, Stolz envisions a strong working relationship with Magentrix and its cloud solutions.