What to ask a vendor before buying tile manufacturing software

Tiles of one design are not interchangeable. Two cartons of the same code can differ in shade and caliber, and a customer laying a floor will see it. Software holding one quantity per item cannot warn you.

Request a stock screen for one design. You want each production lot with its shade code, caliber, grade and cartons left, and then you should ask what happens when an order tries to mix lots. Watch what the vendor does when you ask for a hold on a lot.

Shade matters most for large formats and polished vitrified tiles, where a mismatch across two cartons shows in the first row of the floor. Ask how the system picks lots for an order of several hundred cartons.

At the end of the line, tiles are sorted into first, standard and commercial grades, with rejects set aside, and the grade decides price and customer. A generic ERP often has one quality status: pass or fail. Mixed-grade orders, where a dealer takes first and standard together, need separate lines for each.

Request a demo of the sorting entry. Who keys the counts, and how fast? Can a sorter on a tablet enter cartons by grade for a lot, and does the system compare tiles pressed with tiles sorted and show the gap?

Ask about reclassification as well. A lot sorted as first grade in March may be downgraded in May, and the cartons should move without losing the lot history. Watch the vendor’s face.

Tiles break at the press, the dryer, the kiln, the polishing line and in packing. A plant that tracks only a final loss figure cannot find the stage at fault, so ask whether breakage is recorded per stage with a reason code.

Then ask for the kiln record. Firing curve, kiln number, car number and the lots loaded should be linked. When a batch comes out with pinholes or warping, you can then see which kiln run it shared.

Press scrap returned to the body mix needs a record. Otherwise reclaimed material hides inside a body batch. Ask to see it work.

A customer sends back a complaint with a carton photo. Can the system trace that carton to its pallet, lot, kiln run, glaze batch and body mix? Have the vendor do it live, from a sample carton number.

Check clay, frit and glaze supplier lots as well. A change of supplier lot often explains a shade shift that nobody can otherwise find, and without that link you will argue about it for weeks.

Ask one more thing. What happens to the lot record when a carton is returned from a dealer? Returns carry shade information you can use, but only if the carton’s lot is scanned or keyed when it comes back in.

Give the vendor one week of real production, sorting and dispatch figures, including the messy ones. Watch how they load it and what they cannot model, and keep a list of every workaround they suggest.

Then let your sorting supervisor and dispatch clerk try it for an hour. Their reaction tells you more than the sales deck.

Test the oddities too, such as sample boards, tiles sold loose to a local mason, or breakage credited by a distributor. Note which of these the vendor can show without a custom job, and which they promise later.