Transforming Tradition: How We Digitized a 60-Year-Old Craft

Let’s be honest: when you think of digital transformation, you probably don’t immediately picture a flooring installer with a knee-kicker in one hand and a smartphone in the other. Saint-Maclou just celebrated its 60th anniversary. We are a company with deep roots, 140 stores across France, and a workforce that prides itself on technical craftsmanship, not necessarily IT proficiency. In fact, when we first started discussing the idea of digitizing our installation process, we joked that some of our best installers were more “Minitel native” than “digital native.”

But we faced a reality that every legacy business eventually encounters. We had incredible expertise and a loyal customer base, but our internal processes were stuck in the past. We rely on a “trio” to make magic happen: the salesperson, the client, and the installer. For years, the friction between these three was managed through paper files, phone calls, and manual scheduling. We knew that to double our activity by 2025, we couldn’t just work harder; we had to work smarter. The journey to get there taught me that true innovation isn’t just about the software you buy; it’s about the culture you build around it.

The Hidden Cost of Complexity

Before we launched our new platform-which we affectionately call POSI (short for “Pose Easy”)-the daily life of an installer involved a lot of invisible friction. Imagine this: to get their schedule and technical files for the week, an installer often had to drive physically to the store. If a client changed a date or a product was delayed, that meant another trip or a frantic game of telephone. We calculated that our 350 salaried installers were driving millions of kilometers a year, and a significant chunk of that wasn’t spent getting to a client’s house-it was spent chasing information.

On the other side of the counter, our salespeople were carrying a massive “mental load.” Flooring is technical. You need to know that if you pour a leveling compound (réagréage), it might need two days to dry before you can lay the parquet. If a salesperson forgot to factor that in, the installer would arrive, find a wet floor, and the whole project would derail. We were asking our sales teams to be master schedulers, technical experts, and customer service agents all at once, using systems that didn’t talk to each other.

The goal wasn’t to replace the human element, but to remove the administrative noise so our people could focus on their craft.

We realized that simplifying the process wasn’t just an operational upgrade; it was a necessity for the well-being of our teams. We needed a solution that could handle the complex logic of our trade-like calculating drying times automatically-so our salespeople could focus on the client, not the calendar.

Overcoming the “Big Brother” Fear

Choosing the right technology was the easy part. We partnered with Devoteam and selected ServiceNow because of its ability to act as a central platform, a true “hub” connecting our disparate systems. But the real challenge was human. When you tell a field workforce that you are rolling out a geoplanning tool, the immediate reaction is visceral. They hear “geolocation,” and they think “surveillance.”

We faced immediate pushback. The fear was that this was a “Big Brother” project designed to track their every move. We had to be incredibly transparent. We spent months explaining that we aren’t tracking them; we are optimizing their routes. We showed them that the goal was to ensure they spent less time in traffic and more time earning their commission. We demonstrated that the system would respect their autonomy, allowing them to flag issues on a job site instantly via their smartphone rather than waiting to fill out paperwork at the end of the week.

We also obsessed over the User Experience (UX). We didn’t just take the standard interface; we stripped it down. We renamed buttons to match our internal vocabulary. We removed every click that wasn’t absolutely necessary. We made it so simple that even our most tech-resistant installers-the ones we affectionately thought would never give up their flip phones-picked it up in days.

Technology is only adopted when it solves a problem for the user, not just for the company. When the installer realized this tool put the technical file in their pocket, the fear evaporated.

The pilot phase in our eight southern stores was a revelation. We saw installers checking their jobs 15 days in advance. We saw them alerting salespeople to potential issues-like a missing trim or a heavy armoire the client forgot to mention-long before they arrived on site. The conversation shifted from “Why are you tracking me?” to “Here is how we can fix this job before it goes wrong.”

A Million Kilometers and a New Culture

The results of this transformation have been staggering, and quite frankly, better than we anticipated. By optimizing our routes and digitizing the file transfer process, we project we will save nearly one million kilometers of travel per year for our salaried installers. That is a massive win for our carbon footprint and our bottom line. But the qualitative wins are even more significant.

Historically, salespeople played favorites. A seller would always book “Jean-Paul” because they knew he was reliable, leaving “Jean-Pierre” with an empty schedule, even if Jean-Pierre was available and closer to the job. It was human nature, but it was inefficient. The platform now democratizes the work. It assigns the job based on skills, location, and availability. We are seeing a much better balance in workload, moving from a 65/35 split between salaried and partner installers to a healthier 85/15 utilization of our internal teams.

Furthermore, the data integration has been seamless. Because we built this with a “platform first” mindset, connecting POSI to our data lake took literally two hours. We are now capturing data from the field-start times, finish times, technical anomalies-that we simply never had before. This data isn’t just sitting there; it’s helping us refine our installation times, meaning our quotes are becoming more accurate every day.

We often fear that digital tools will distance us from one another. In our experience, the opposite happened. By digitizing the routine, we elevated the relationship between sales and service.

As we look toward a national rollout this autumn, I am filled with optimism. We are moving toward a future where we can offer even more services, like renovation and maintenance, managed through this same efficient hub. We are proving that a 60-year-old company can be just as agile as a startup, provided you listen to your people first. The technology is powerful, but it is the acceptance and adaptability of our teams that truly drives our success.