- Client
- A national homebuilder
- Industry
- Homebuilding
- Customer satisfaction, over three years
- +20%
- Source systems unified
- 4
- Working from one live picture
- Every division
The problem
The ERP held the data and couldn't answer questions with it. Sales, starts, closings and inventory each lived somewhere, spread across a SQL Server warehouse, the construction management system, web analytics and a customer-survey platform, with nothing joining them up. So every meeting ran on spreadsheets somebody had put together by hand that week, each with its own cut-off and its own assumptions. Leadership spent the first part of every review deciding which version of the numbers to believe, and month-end figures had a habit of changing after the fact.
What we built
We built a reporting platform on top of the warehouse and connected the other three systems to it. It carries the day-to-day reports the business runs on, covering everything from sales through starts, prestart, vertical construction milestones, closings, inventory and project budgets, plus weekly digests and month-end close. Large dashboards rotate on office screens, including customer-happiness measures, so everyone can see where things stand without opening anything. Survey sending and the updates from the other systems run automatically instead of taking up somebody's Thursday afternoon. Sign-in goes through the company's existing Microsoft accounts, and only approved people can reach the admin functions.
The outcome
Leadership and every sales division work from the same live picture of sales, starts, closings and inventory, which is the visibility the ERP was never able to give them. Seeing build progress against schedule in real time is what let the teams keep homes moving on time and to the standard buyers expect, and over the three years that followed the client's customer satisfaction scores rose 20%. At month-end the figures are captured and locked, so last month's report reads the same next year as it did on close day. Nobody has to put the weekly spreadsheets together anymore.