Growing 30% year-on-year in a market that contracted 20%.
COEN Composite Wood is a Brisbane-based national distributor delivering strong year-on-year growth in one of Australia’s most rapidly competitive product categories. Seeking closer integration across an already capable systems stack, the business partnered with Interlume on an engagement spanning all three pillars — Integrate, Illuminate, Automate — to surface the clarity needed to deploy capital, marketing investment and team effort with greater precision.
COEN Composite Wood operates from Brisbane and supplies nationally across decking, screening, cladding, fencing and sleepers — serving residential builders, trade contractors, architects, and modular construction clients.
Composite timber adoption has accelerated rapidly in Australia, drawing significant new competition. Between 2021 and 2023, competitors in the category grew from 15 to 167 — more than a tenfold increase in two and a half years. In the most recent financial year, a broader construction market contraction saw sector revenue fall by approximately 20% on the back of intensified competitor pricing pressure.
Despite these conditions, COEN continued to grow at around 30% year-on-year — outperforming the category through disciplined commercial execution and a strong product offering.
COEN’s leadership identified that closer integration across their existing systems and deeper, more connected reporting would unlock the next stage of profitability. Strong product-level reporting was already in place — but operational platforms held more value than was being fully leveraged.
- An integrated view across margin, inventory, pipeline and financial performance would sharpen commercial decisions
- Closer system integration would surface clearer signals on where capital and marketing investment generate the strongest return
- Project-based revenue creates inherently lumpy demand — off-the-shelf inventory tools like NetStock weren’t designed for this usage pattern, generating reorder suggestions that didn’t fit how the business actually buys and ships
- Greater data clarity would support role definition, freeing team capacity for the highest-value commercial work
- Connected reporting would link operational activity directly to financial outcomes — supporting continued outperformance
Interlume was engaged to design and build an integrated intelligence layer across COEN’s existing platforms — taking strong individual systems and connecting them into a single, real-time view of the business. The engagement was a worked example of the full Interlume framework: Integrate the platforms cleanly with full CRM cleansing and data remediation; Illuminate the operational reality through live dashboards and an automated executive briefing; Automate the workflows — quote follow-up and reporting — that were silently consuming the team’s time.
The engagement was scoped around three commercial outcomes: improve the visibility of capital position (where it’s working, where it’s tied up, where it’s generating return); improve human resource utilisation (freeing team time from repetitive work so effort goes to high-value activity); and improve operational efficiency (especially around the lumpy, project-driven inventory cycles that off-the-shelf tools couldn’t accommodate).
| Area | Before — capable but siloed | After — connected and integrated |
|---|---|---|
| Management reporting | Strong product-level reporting compiled from individual system exports | Fully automated executive briefing delivered before business hours each Monday — integrated across all data sources |
| Margin visibility | Product-level margin tracked individually | Margin connected across product, category, customer, and channel — landed cost including FX, freight and duty calculated per SKU |
| Inventory management | Off-the-shelf tools (NetStock) couldn’t model project-based, lumpy demand accurately | Custom inventory intelligence built around COEN’s project cycles — reorder priority, aging, and capital-tied-up views |
| Quote follow-up | Handled by individual sales team members alongside other work | Structured nine-day automated sequence — SMS, call tasks, email fallbacks — every touchpoint logged automatically |
| CRM & customer data | CRM and inventory operating as separate systems | Fully integrated — 10,375 contact records cleansed, 66 duplicate groups resolved before go-live |
| Role clarity & productivity | Roles defined around system access and operational habit | Role boundaries informed by integrated operational data — supporting better utilisation of human resources |
| Marketing investment | Investment decisions made without a fully integrated view of channel and segment margin contribution | Channel and segment performance visible — marketing capital directed at the strongest-return opportunities |
| Strategic positioning | Strong market knowledge held by leadership | Competitive pricing analysis across 20+ brands and a 12-month strategic roadmap with measurable KPIs |
Six deliverables, sequenced through the Integrate → Illuminate → Automate framework. Each one built on the foundation of the work before it.
“We’ve kept growing in a market where others have gone backwards. Having an integrated view of margin, inventory and pipeline in one place gives us the confidence to keep pushing — knowing where to invest, where to hold, and where to focus our team’s energy. That clarity is what compounds.”
- Systems audit
- Data source mapping
- Commercial requirements
- Budget scoping
- Opportunity prioritisation
- API pipeline build
- Data warehouse design
- Dashboard development
- Historical backfill
- Executive briefing setup
- Process automation build
- CRM integration & cleansing
- Role & capital insight
- Strategic analysis & roadmap
- Handover & documentation
Clarity from your data. Confidence in your decisions.
We start with a structured discovery session to understand where your capital is employed, where your team’s effort is going, and where closer integration could unlock the next stage of your business. No jargon, no overselling — just a clear picture of what’s possible.