Every role gets a WIP
This is the biggest operational shift in the shop.
Corebridge gives design and production a WIP — the daily list of what's theirs to move forward. Waco's team likes it and has used it for years. But a center doing in-house fabrication, electrical, paint, and install has five or six more roles that need the same thing, and until now they were tracked on whiteboards, in heads, or on one-off spreadsheets.
Every role in Waco now has its own WIP in Vantage: production, fabrication, paint, electrical, machine operation, install, sales. Each person sits down at the start of the day with their own list of what's theirs.
A real example: a set of channel letters. Production is making vinyl for the faces. Fabrication is bending returns and assembling the letters. Paint is handling coils. Install is scheduled for the back end. All of it runs in parallel, on different timelines, hitting one target date. Inside Vantage, each workstream is its own event, with its own tasks and its own owner. The fabrication manager knows his letters need to hit paint by Thursday so install can happen the following Wednesday. The painter knows his coils need to be done before the letters arrive.
"Everybody knows which piece of the puzzle is in their court, and when it needs to get done."
Waco is running event types for survey, production, paint, electrical install, unlit rigid install, permitted non-electrical install, RTA vinyl, vehicle graphics, delivery, and service. Each one carries its own task list — the specific things that tend to get missed when a shop is busy. Material checks kick off the moment a project is created, so a specialty-material surprise doesn't hit weeks later. UL documentation. City inspections. Final sign-offs.
Tasks also flow sideways. A salesperson remembering something mid-meeting drops a task to the fabrication manager instead of sending an email that may or may not be read. The fab manager sees it first thing the next morning, with the rest of his list.
Pipeline, in dollars, in real time
In Waco, opportunities move through stages that reflect how a real sign job actually progresses:
- Leads. Salespeople working a prospect.
- Estimating. Building the number.
- Confirmed. Customer has committed — deposit, PO, or full payment.
- Planning. Waco's court — drawings, survey, permit submissions.
- Permitting. The city's court — not actionable, just visible.
- Won. Green-lit and ready to produce.
The moment a lead moves into estimating, Vantage triggers the automation that creates the Corebridge estimate. The salesperson clicks the link in Vantage, lands in the right place in Corebridge, builds the estimate, saves it. The dollar figure syncs back into Vantage.
For Dylan as an operator, the change shows up in the weekly sales meeting. Instead of a conversation about what each salesperson feels is in their pipeline, the conversation is grounded in the same view everyone's looking at. How much is in estimating. How much is in planning waiting on drawings. How much is in the city's hands. How much is in the Won column — coming to production in the next four, six, eight weeks.
"Automate the monotony. Focus on the specialty."
Install, completion, and getting paid
On install day, the crew opens the project on the mobile app. They see the scope, the site information, the photos, the nuanced notes that got gathered weeks earlier during the survey. They work through their tasks, capture photos, and close out on site.
That completion ripples back automatically. When every piece of a project is marked done in Vantage, the project itself moves to Complete. The salesperson gets a task to do the final customer check-in and send the invoice.
Before Vantage, closing out was a monthly ritual. Dylan used to spend time at the end of each month combing through jobs, confirming every completed one was actually marked complete so AR could send the invoices out.
"I don't have to do that anymore. Things are marked complete when they're done, because the people doing them are completing them as they do them."
The direction of travel from here: the invoice fires automatically the moment a job is complete. Salespeople stay close to their customers — but billing doesn't wait on someone remembering to push a button.
What's different for the team
Ask Dylan's team what's most changed and the answer isn't a feature. It's structure.
Growing shops run on people wearing a lot of hats. The more hats, the more grey area about whose job something actually is. Setting up Vantage forced Dylan to answer the questions he'd been carrying on his own. Whose responsibility is this? Who checks that? Who follows up on the other?
"You have a whole team to help you. But this is your job. That's your job. If we're all doing our jobs and completing our tasks, jobs get done — way faster than a small group trying to be glue."
Newer hires ramp faster because the system holds the nuance instead of the team holding it in their heads. More tenured people stop being the only ones who remember to do something.
As a management lens, it's useful. When someone is falling behind, the question stops being about the person. It becomes about the workload. Are they overwhelmed? Is the work distributed wrong? Do we need to delegate? Do we need to hire?
"The depersonalisation of tasks gives you depersonalisation when you look at a workload."
To another Fastsigns operator
Asked what he'd say to another center owner, Dylan doesn't push hard.
"Come to my shop. Hang out for a day. Look at what we're doing. If what you've got is working for you, that's fine. But that doesn't mean it's the best it can be — or that your team's bandwidth can't be completely opened up with a little bit of automation and a little bit of structure."
The vision he gets to when he talks about this with peers is bigger than his own shop. Center owners meet at summits and conventions, and everyone's stacked their own set of tools. Everyone's reinvented their own work-order flow.
"If, ten years ago, somebody had come to me and said — here's a good outline for what this looks like — we'd all be battling for that top spot. We'd be trading tips instead of reinventing the wheel."
Fastsigns Waco is running Vantage alongside Corebridge because Dylan wanted a less stressful culture, a more positive environment, and a shop where people leave at the end of the day feeling like they got something done.
Every growing center we talk to is trying to get to the same place.
