MTN Kitchens: how a New Zealand kitchen maker cut a custom order from 25 days to 5 — on FieldApp

For you: you run a manufacturing or trades business where every job starts with a measure-up and a manual quote that takes days longer than it should.

MTN Kitchens builds custom kitchens in New Zealand without a showroom — no display floor, no salespeople by the door, just well-made cabinetry produced as efficiently as possible, with the savings passed back to the customer. The catch was that a custom order used to take 25 days from the first conversation to a signed order, and almost none of that was manufacturing.

The 25-day problem

Every order started the same way, and every step leaked time.

• The manual measure-up and sketch. A designer spent two to three hours with each customer drawing a sketch by hand. That time was paid for whether or not the customer bought.
• The hand calculation. Someone then priced the materials manually. It was slow, and it was where most pricing errors crept in — a component count off by ten percent put the margin off by about the same.
• The re-entry. The sketch went to the workshop on paper, and the workshop re-typed every measurement. When a handwritten "2,400 mm" became "2,040 mm" on re-entry, the wrong board got cut.
• The wait. Three and a half weeks passed between a customer saying yes and a kitchen being ready to fit — and competitors were winning jobs on lead time alone.

From first enquiry to a booked measure-up — in one tap

MTN put the front of the process on FieldApp, branded as their own on mtnkm.co.nz. A customer books a measure-up straight from the website instead of starting a round of phone tag, and every enquiry — web form, call or the built-in assistant — lands in one shared inbox rather than a designer's notebook. The visit is placed on the calendar with drag-and-drop, and the designer turns up with the job already on their phone.

The quote that stops being a bottleneck

On site, the measurements and the chosen spec — layout, door style, colour, handles — are captured once into a FieldApp quote built from MTN's own priced line items, so the price is right the moment the spec is set. The customer gets a clear, branded quote and signs it electronically in the browser. There is no "we'll come back to you with a number" — the number is already there, and the order is captured the moment they sign.

"Before, the first hour of most mornings went on reconciling yesterday's orders — checking sketches, chasing clarifications, sometimes re-measuring because the notes weren't clear. Now I open the job and the spec is already there. The first hour is production time." — Marco, workshop manager

One record, no re-entry

The biggest change is what happens after the customer signs. The signed order, the measurements and the full spec live in one record that flows straight into scheduling and out to the install crew — nobody re-types anything into a second system, so the "2,400 became 2,040" class of error simply disappears. The fitters work from FieldApp's offline field app with the spec, a checklist and photos, and the customer follows the order from "booked" to "fitted" on a live status page instead of phoning to ask. When the kitchen is in, the invoice goes out the same day because the job already holds everything it needs.

25 days to 5

By removing the steps that never needed a human — the manual pricing, the paper hand-off, the re-entry, the phone tag — MTN got a standard custom order from 25 days down to about 5 working days, without adding a single person. The designer is still there for the complex jobs; the difference is that their time now goes to judgement and relationships instead of arithmetic and re-typing.

Run a manufacturing or trades business where every job starts with a measure-up and a manual quote? FieldApp puts booking, quoting with e-signature, scheduling, an offline field app, a customer status portal and invoicing in one branded system — so the order moves at the speed of the work, not the paperwork. Try FieldApp free for 14 days, or see mtnkm.co.nz for what a no-showroom kitchen maker looks like.