Our Story

AdvanceWare was founded over twenty years ago born from the idea to take the concepts of complex design, tie them to pricing, then push them through manufacturing. Specializing in Design, Manufacturing and Systems Management, our founding partners used their skillsets to assemble software systems to serve complex manufacturing problems, and streamline these processes using the knowledge gained only through the design, creation and management of highly configured specialty products. Please take some time to read about our leadership team to better understand their backgrounds, skillsets and talents.

Our Leadership

Brian and Kerry

Our focus from day one, was to use industry standard CAD tools to properly and exactly represent the construction of complex highly configured products, such as cabinetry, with pricing, engineering data, and automated manufacturing. Throughout the past twenty years, we've been working hard to add the right people along the way, and to build out the modules necessary to accomplish this stated goal. Initially, AdvanceWare was focused on Dealer and Shop order management through TheKitchenPond brand products Kitchen Manager and Factory Manager. As demand for Order Entry products grew, we set our sights on creating the most user friendly software in the Industry. The natural next step was to move further into Order Editing to give the manufacturers the tools needed to efficiently acknowledge these orders to their customers. Knowing our original vision of properly visually displaying each product to the end user based on the manufacturers specific design specs, we made the move to add a few people and to begin the build out of our Bill of Materials module. By creating this module first, we could then use the data it produced to visually draw each component using industry standard CAD tools. As this product matured, we knew that if a single product could be configured using this manufacturing data, collections of these products could be combined together to create entire designs. Designs could then be rendered, brought to life in 3D and complete the circle of development toward the end consumer. During this time, the industry continued to move more and more toward web development and away from on-premise software applications. For the past several years, we've added some very talented people to migrate these products to the web environment. We've chosen to leverage the most secure online platform in the industry to build our suite of products moving toward the future. Development continues on all fronts, and is pushing deeper into manufacturing with our 3D Item Builder product to carry proper CNC data to the shop floor for a completely automated system.

Our Team

Our company is filled with exciting personalities, with varied backgrounds of professional experience and education. We are scattered acrossed North America with our main offices located in sunny Carefree, AZ and Ormond Beach, FL. Please take a few minutes to read about each of our talented people.

Timeline

1989

Brian O'Rourke begins designing high-end Kitchens and Baths while attending Arizona State University for Architecture.

Kerry Francis begins working on programming machinery at a cabinet shop in Florida.

1990

1995

Brian and Kerry work together at a software company based in Denver, CO. for the next three years.

1996

Brian receives his CKD from the National Kitchen and Bath Association.

Kerry steps out on his own to create AdvanceWare to develop software for a high-end custom cabinet shop.

1998

Brian relocates to Pennsylvania as Director of Information Technology for a conglomerate of high-end custom cabinet shops.

Kerry is hired by a large ERP software company to design CAD products for other home related products.

2000

Brian founds TheKitchenPond to create business and order management software for Design Studios and Cabinet Shops.

2002

Brian and Kerry join forces to work together to build Order Entry software and begin to layout their vision.

TheKitchenPond lands its first large custom cabinet manufacturer to build out v1 of our Order Entry module.

2003

Peggy O'Rourke joins the busincess to focus on Customer Relations, Support, and Sales.

2005

TheKitchenPond's growth continues with the signing of another group of large cabinet manufacturer and industry supplier accounts.

Our initial Bill of Materials software is released for industry use.

2006

2010

TheKitchenPond is rebranded as AdvanceWare and the team continues to grow.

The release of our long awaited SQL Order Entry product is brought to market in January of 2014.

2014

2016

Additional staff is brought on board to begin development of our suite of Web App modules.

Development on the Design Module begins in earnest with Kerry leading the team.

2018

2019

Our Catalog Development team is assembled to assist our manufacturing customers build out their product catalogs.

Our 2Configure brand of online web app Order Entry and Design software is released.

2022