Midwest Floor Coverings

Midwest Floor Coverings, also known as Midwest 1938, is an 86-year-old, third-generation family-owned flooring distribution company with five branch locations across the Midwest and a newly opened location in Montana. The company distributes flooring products to major retailers including Home Depot and Lowe’s and holds exclusive distributor status for certain product lines in the Midwest region. Beyond flooring, the business has expanded into quartz countertops, custom cabinetry, and in-house cabinet manufacturing. After 24 years on Klipboard's Navigator platform, Midwest has made the strategic decision to migrate to Klipboard's modern ERP One, unlocking a new era of data visibility, operational flexibility, and technology-driven growth.

We needed to modernize — to use technology to our advantage, streamline our operations, and bring more consistency across the business.”

‍— Rodrigo Melo, VP of Technology at Midwest Floor Coverings.

Challanges

Midwest has been a Klipboard customer for over two decades, running its operations on Navigator, Klipboard's legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for the flooring industry. While the platform had served the business through significant growth, its limitations had become increasingly apparent as the company diversified and expanded.

Navigator is a powerful system that served us well for a long time, but it's an older system built around a keyboard command-based interface that takes real commitment to master. As the business grew and we started hiring more frequently, onboarding new employees became a much bigger challenge.”

‍— Rodrigo Melo

Beyond usability, the platform's restricted backend architecture limited what data could be accessed and reported on. Margin analysis, sales performance tracking, delivery planning and customer-level insights were difficult to surface in a timely, actionable way. For a growing, multi-branch business with diverse product lines, this lack of analytical visibility was a critical gap.

Navigator was very restricted on the backend, there was a lot of analytics we simply couldn't get out of the system. That was one of the biggest reasons we made the move to ERP One."

Solutions

Midwest Floor Coverings worked with Klipboard to migrate from Navigator to ERP One, a transition that preserved the existing Klipboard relationship while dramatically expanding what the platform could do for the business.

ERP One's open data architecture gave Midwest immediate access to the full depth of its operational data, down to the millisecond. Using the Phocas integration for business intelligence, the team built custom reporting dashboards tailored to each audience within the organization: trend-based pattern views for executives, granular margin reports for product managers, and competitive performance scorecards for sales representatives.

Having access to all your data — and the ability to present it in the right way for each team — is essential for a business to grow.”

‍— Rodrigo Melo

The platform's flexibility proved equally valuable. ERP One was configured to match Midwest's specific workflows across flooring distribution, countertops, cabinetry, and special-order fulfillment without requiring the business to adapt to a one-size-fits-all template.

One of my favorite things about ERP One is the flexibility. In my experience, I've seen it work well across all kinds of businesses. And even within the same industry, no two companies operate the same way. Two businesses side by side could have completely different workflows, and ERP One can be configured to support both."

Benefits

Since migrating to ERP One, Midwest Floor Coverings has seen meaningful improvements across data visibility, operational efficiency and employee productivity.

On the reporting side, the business now has real-time access to margin performance across every product line and branch. Executives can track daily trends and identify under performing products before they become larger problems. Sales managers have visibility into individual rep performance at the customer level, enabling targeted coaching conversations and a more accountable, competitive sales culture.

The way ERP One handles reporting, finance and accounting is quite different from Navigator. It's much more flexible, and you can actually see what's going on with the numbers."

‍— Rodrigo Melo

ERP One's flexible configuration has also allowed Midwest to consolidate its diverse operations — flooring distribution, countertops, cabinetry and special-order fulfillment — onto a single platform without compromising on process specificity. The modern interface has significantly shortened the time it takes to onboard new hires.

ERP One is more modern. The flooring industry is still very old-fashioned. There are companies out there using paper delivery documents and fax machines. ERP One is helping modernize both the industry and the businesses within it.”

Looking further ahead, Midwest is positioning itself at the intersection of ERP and AI. By leveraging ERP One's open API architecture, the team is already pulling operational data into external AI tools for analysis with plans to feed those insights back directly into ERP One, creating a closed loop between data, analysis and action.

Moving from a legacy ERP to a modern system has its challenges, but if you take the time to do it right and work closely with Klipboard through the implementation, the payoff is absolutely worth it.”

‍— Rodrigo Melo

Key benefits Midwest has achieved from ERP One include:

• ‍Migration: Moved from Navigator to ERP One within the same trusted vendor relationship, with minimal disruption to existing workflows‍
• Faster onboarding: A modern, intuitive interface replaced a 9–12-month learning curve and made training new hires significantly easier‍
• Full data access: Unrestricted access to all operational and financial data, down to the millisecond across every branch‍
• Custom dashboards: Tailored reporting views for executives, product managers and sales reps, each surfacing the metrics that matter most to them‍
• Proactive margin management: Daily product-line trend reporting helps leadership spot underperformance before it becomes a bigger problem‍
• Sales accountability: Customer-level rep performance visibility drives more targeted coaching and healthy competition across the team‍
• Flexible configuration: A single platform supports Midwest's diverse operations across flooring, countertops, cabinetry and special-order fulfillment‍
• AI-ready architecture: Open AP integration supports current and future connections with external AI tools and analytics platforms‍
• Built to scale: A modern, adaptable platform supporting Midwest's continued geographic and operational expansion