The call for more designers, salespeople and just about every other admin personnel is getting louder by the day. There are not enough hours in the week to meet sales demands. What if you could provide your team with tools that would give them more time? This way, you could save money by having fewer employees do more. While you’re at it, why not improve accountability with proper measurement of productivity, create fewer errors, and free up time for your sales team to make more sales calls? You can start by doing what other companies have been doing for years.
Builders FirstSource, Inc. (BFS) is a national supplier of engineered wood products and installable specialty items for the commercial homebuilding industry. Their use of AppWright JobCenter has been a significant driver of cost reduction and service level improvement in their roof truss and wall panel design and manufacturing areas. BFS also uses AppWright JobCenter to coordinate the purchasing, shipment, and installation of specialty items like windows, doors, fireplaces and other items that BFS supplies to commercial homebuilders.
- Significant design cycle time reductions
- Same staff can handle twice the workload (or reduced staff can handle the same workload)
- Costly design errors are dramatically reduced
- Employee accountability and productivity measurement is improved
- Customer satisfaction and retention is improved
- Average profit margin per job is increased
- Lost invoices and missed billings are eliminated through workflow tracking
Full Narrative:
The Jacksonville, FL division of BFS is one of the largest roof truss engineering and wall panel plants in the Southeast. A simplified view of the workflow for engineering and constructing a set of roof trusses for a home is as follows:
- The builder submits a set of plans to the BFS design department. These plans are used by truss designers to create a detailed set of roof truss designs that will later be used by the production department in physically cutting the lumber and assembling the complete package of roof trusses to be used for a house.
- Before actual production of the roof trusses can commence, the original house plans and the newly-completed truss designs are sent to the county permitting agency for design review and approval.
- Once the approval is received, the production department takes the design, cuts the necessary lumber and assembles the roof trusses for delivery to the home site.
- After delivery, the accounting department bills the customer (homebuilder) for the delivered truss package.
- If any repairs or adjustments to the finished trusses are required in the field, BFS has crews who must quickly respond to the customer (homebuilder) and address any quality issues or design errors that are found.
At each point in the basic workflow, valuable time was lost in keeping track of which designer had what jobs (which were originally in paper folders routed to various design desks), finding out what stage the county permitting process was at and communicating with the customer to clarify design requirements. In addition, if communication with the customer were not thoroughly documented, BFS would become responsible for costly after-production design changes, which would often eliminate any profit margin in the original order. Because individual designers were constantly shuffling physical stacks of job folders from station to station, it was more difficult to accurately manage personal workload and hold designers accountable for timely completion of assignments. The average time from job intake to a finished design ready for production was 20 days prior to BFS implementing AppWright JobCenter. Six months after implementation, average job turnaround time was reduced to just 10 days. After the success that the Jacksonville division had with AppWright JobCenter, BFS Corporate rolled the product out to the bulk of the national organization and has seen similar results in each division.
(End of case study)
Do not fall for the “we got something just like it and works just as well” line from common vendors. No, they do not. Builders FirstSource also uses AppWright (AW) to manage the ordering, delivery and installation of inventory specialty items like doors, windows, fireplaces and other items at the lumberyards. Can your vendor’s software do this and provide a complete customization of the user interface to make it look like the written forms you are already accustomed to using? The answer is no. AW is customized to adapt to your existing processes and is truly fully customized, starting with the user interfaces and extending to everything else, such as assigning tasks and other processes.
Ditch the terminal server (Citrix) applications! A true browser-based application like AW can be easily accessed and used by any smartphone, tablet or PC using a browser from anywhere. Citrix-type systems require a complicated setup, maintenance work, very large central servers, a skilled IT staff to support it and a much higher bandwidth internet connection. Modern truly web-based design applications like AW will always outperform the older terminal server technology and do it for much less of an investment in support staff, whereas browsers are nearly maintenance free. Anyone who has to use a terminal server application is always concerned about internet speed, but companies using AW can use any web browser and have far fewer issues with their internet throughput. The browser-based application simply uses far less bandwidth.
Here is a partial testimonial of a company using a browser-based communication system:
United Truss
Ed DeBiasio, President/Owner
Innisfil, ON Canada
Our company has three lumberyards that our component plant services. Our service area is central Ontario with currently 16 different outside sales representatives. Component sales are just one aspect of United Lumber Building Centers, but a significant profit center and sales enhancer that United has embraced for many years…
… it became a labor saving, time enhancer and something that every salesperson would only let go if you pried from their dead hands. What a difference it has made!
Working with both truss applications and AppWright has been a non-issue for our designers and everyone else. We use the truss management application for costing only…
This biggest advantage is helping our sales team spend more time making more sales and maintaining great customer service. Most of the time-consuming phone calls, email game of tag and other time wasters have all but been eliminated. We have salespeople who are working weekends, nights or go on vacation in Europe and yet are still able to monitor the progress of their sales via the AppWright web browser. Everything they need is always just a few mouse clicks away. Also, automated reminders help everyone stay on track with project processing task and scheduling. They love it.
…If you want something that can actually enhance the productivity of all your staff, including the sales team, I highly recommend AppWright. Compared to the cost of new equipment, this has been a true bargain.
(End of partial testimonial)
So, if you want to increase the capabilities of your existing team, try improving their communication system so they can spend more time doing what they’re skilled at. Many more companies can attest how AppWright’s browser-based application has indeed improved their company’s capacities, efficiencies and helped them improve their sales. Just keep in mind, there is a huge difference between terminal access applications and true browser-based applications. They are not equal!
Website: www.todd-drummond.com Phone (USA): 603-763-8857
E–mail: todd@todd-drummond.com Copyright © 2017