The workplace has come a long way thanks to technology — or perhaps in spite of it. Cell phones, e-mail, and software help people stay connected, with immediacy, but is it all it’s cracked up to be?
With regard to office use, technology also keeps many people tethered to their desks, lest they miss an e-mail. Super-fast connections often come at the expense of clarity, whether it be because of a dropped call or a misunderstood message.
Photo Credit: Rendering: courtesy Vision Remodeling
For professional remodelers, technology offers plenty of benefits, such as enhanced design capabilities, accounting accuracy, and speedier communication between office and field. But with time sheets, plans, forms, and change orders flitting through cyberspace, remodelers may be sacrificing personal communication, particularly with clients, in favor of faster, more profitable results. Here are four companies that have maximized use of technology without minimizing the quality of the customer experience.
Picture This
When Vision Remodeling, in Little Canada, Minn., moved into its new building in 2006, owner Todd Polifka took advantage of technology from the start. The company has used Chief Architect design software since it began in 2004, and opportunities with the new facility allowed it to take the 3-D rendering capabilities to a new level.
“When we started talking about being more aggressive in growing our business, we decided to create a place where clients could come in for a presentation and really experience the project we were working on for them,” Polifka says.
The result is a high-tech conference room that literalizes the Vision Remodeling name. When a design is finished, clients join Todd and the designer in the conference room where the digital plans are presented on flat-screen monitors for a virtual walkthrough. Wireless capabilities let the designer make adjustments on the spot. Clients get the full experience of how their soon-to-be remodeled home will look.
“Taking this approach has turned our projects from gray to black-and-white,” Polifka says. “Homeowners want to understand what they’re getting for their dollar. If you go on about a bearing wall and a glulam LVL, they’ll say, ‘You lost me — show me what it looks like.’”
For Vision Remodeling, in Little Canada, Minn., the flat-screen TV in the company’s conference room looks unassuming
but makes a big impact when it’s used for client presentations. A wireless keyboard and mouse on the conference table
make it easy to navigate design plans on screen.
Photo Credit: Michael Zaccardi, Michael Zaccardi Photography
The more interactive presentation format allows Polifka to do just that, and he says that clients leave design meetings feeling confident in the direction their project is going. “At this point in the process, the client has chosen Vision as the company they’ll do the design with,” he says. “Of the design retainers we get, we’re converting in excess of 90% of those to build contracts.”
The conference room isn’t the only place that flat screens are incorporated. Even the front-desk area has a monitor where slide shows of past projects scroll for visitors. Overall, Polifka says the company spent more than $10,000 to outfit its townhouse office with high-tech tools, but that the investment is worth it.
“As the ticket price of a project increases, and as technology is being used more widely, people are definitely expecting a certain level of digital presentation and project coordination,” Polifka says.
Time in the Field
The team at Landis Construction also takes advantage of design software, and has plans for a presentation room in their Washington, D.C., offices. Right now though, the company is focused on technology that keeps crews connected and accounted for.
“We want to stay in touch with our crews as much as possible, so we set up our server to allow us to push e-mails to our project managers’ and some lead carpenters’ cell phones,” says co-owner Chris Landis. “We’ve also started using software called Xora that lets our field crews manage their time sheets on their phones.” In addition to time management, the software has Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities, so the company can track crew members’ whereabouts.
After kicking off this workforce management approach in May 2008, Landis is looking forward to seeing how the software helps the company manage overhead. From the start, more streamlined time-sheet management was evident. “The software goes right into our accounting software,” Landis says, noting that the company used paper time sheets before Xora. “There are so many inherent problems with that kind of setup,” he says. “We’d have to chase people down when we didn’t get their time sheet or it was incomplete, and then physically transfer all of the information into the computer.”
Moreover, the GPS component lets the company see the location of each crew member in real time, and helps confirm workers’ hours. Though Landis says there’s some concern about the “big brother” effect of employee tracking, the benefits outweigh the risks. “We had no way to verify if everyone was on the job when they were supposed to be,” he says. “The new phone-based software puts their time sheet right in front of them, so they can clock in and out, and we can also see their location on the map. We had been seeing our overhead go up, and we’ve chosen these tools to help us get a handle on that.”
To roll out the new technology, the company invested in rugged new phones for each crew member who would be using the software and tried it on just a couple of phones to get started. Once the initial users were comfortable, training sessions were held for the rest of the crews. “We emphasized the ease of the program and the time it would save,” Landis says. “We’re looking forward to seeing the long-term results.”
Serve It Up
Landis also touts the benefits of another office tech advantage: networked computers with a shared server. “Having the computers networked together lets us keep the design side and the construction side linked in,” he says. This is something remodeler David Merrick is familiar with. His company, Merrick Design and Build, in Kensington, Md., uses Microsoft’s SharePoint Server to keep everyone connected.
“When the phone rings and new lead comes in, the first thing we do is open SharePoint,” Merrick says. “Our entire sales process is handled and tracked there because we could customize it with our own lists.”
Three-dimensional renderings, like this one created by Vision Remodeling using Chief Architect, let clients walk through their remodeled homes before the project even begins.
For example, Merrick has SharePoint set up to show him, at a glance, the status of any project on the company’s calendar, the dollar volume of each project, and where leads are coming from. Beyond creating customized workflows, Merrick says server-based SharePoint is closely connected with Outlook e-mail, letting users save e-mail messages to a central repository and keep documents in a common location.
“Many people will use spreadsheets for the same purposes as what we’re doing here,” Merrick says. “But having everything server-based has a lot of benefits — most importantly: there’s only ever one version of the data. We can all access the server at the same time, and if I add or change something, it’s reflected on everyone’s screen as soon as they refresh.”
Also, because it’s so closely connected with Outlook, the firm can keep a master calendar of everyone’s meetings and events and not worry about scheduling meetings over one another.
Moreover, with files backed up off-site, Merrick identifies an implied insurance policy that accompanies server-based work processes. “The files don’t actually reside on the computer, so if any of our workstations crashed, we’d still retain the information on the off-site server,” Merrick says. “That’s how businesses should be set up — workstations shouldn’t host data.”
Merrick remembers an industry friend who lost all of his company’s computer equipment to a fire. With project information stored on a server, the company had to replace the machines but didn’t have to worry about recreating all of the project documentation.
Keyboards vs. Clients
Besides servers, cell phones, and flat screens, other opportunities to incorporate technologyinto the remodeling workflow include software, digital cameras, interactive Web sites, and more. Some such tools help remodelers work more efficiently, and some make it possible to run a whole job over e-mail. After all, in-person client meetings only slow things down, right?
Not so, says Linda Gridley, owner of Gridley Co., in Campbell, Calif. Like Polifka, Gridley presents clients with virtual walk-throughs of their plans. She’s also beginning to use a new software that will let the company estimate a bathroom in all of five minutes. These approaches let designers make presentations quickly, but she recognizes that this could come at the expense of client interaction.
“Everything depends on the client — you have to go their speed,” Gridley says. “That was a mistake we made early on. We could finish the design, make the presentation in 90 minutes, and have a contract and a pen ready for them. That really put them off.”
Now, even with speed and technological advances, Gridley says that the company’s focus is to let people know what they’re buying and how the company is going to solve their problems.
Communication comes in different forms. For remodeler David Merrick, server-based SharePoint, shown here on screen, keeps staff updated. Landis Construction uses cell phone–based Xora (below).
Polifka agrees. “We want people to leave our offices feeling confident in the direction we’re going and in the company they’ve chosen,” he says. “So beyond the technology, we try to make them feel comfortable during our presentations. There’s a hospitality aspect, like offering clients a bottle of water when they walk in the door, that lets them know what this relationship is going to be like down the road.”
Vision Remodeling also uses video testimonials on the company Web site — another aspect of technology that helps the firm distinguish itself from competitors while helping clients understand what they’re getting for their remodeling dollar.
Inside the office, Landis identifies some extra expenses involved in maintaining a technology, but says that the investment is worth the benefits. “Even with your basic computers and servers, there’s server maintenance to consider, upgrades, adding memory, backing up files, and security issues,” he says. “But even with all that, it’s not more trouble than it’s worth. The ability to pass documents around so easily and send them out quickly really makes our workflow more efficient.”
Overseas Solution
Linda Gridley is a self-proclaimed “Internet chick.” Her Silicon Valley-area company has grown up with technology, so e-mail is second nature. So is spam. “Most of the time, I just go through and delete all the unsolicited messages,” says the president of Gridley Co., in Campbell, Calif. Thankfully, one recent message piqued her interest before it was relegated to the virtual circular file.
“We had a job come up with the historical society that involved both house plans and landscape plans, and we needed some renderings,” Gridley says. She knew it would take her team too long to generate the renderings, “so we outsourced it to China.”
To be sure, Gridley notes that she did not outsource the design of the project — just the 3-D rendering of plans finished by her in-house team. This was after some due diligence on her part to learn more about the company Gems-Studio Shanghai. “I had been getting some e-mails from them and we took a look at their Web site and contacted them for examples of the work they do,” Gridley says.
Satisfied with what Gems-Studio had to offer, and despite the long distance, Gridley gave the service the green light. The turnaround time and small monetary investment were big selling points, she says. Once the plans were e-mailed to China, two sets of renderings were turned around in 5 days for $600. “It would have taken us two weeks and thousands of dollars,” Gridley says. “They work around the clock, so it was fast and we didn't have to pay anything until they were done. It was a really pioneering project without being high-risk.”
Would she use the service again? “Definitely,” Gridley says, especially for complicated projects or for high-end clients who would benefit from having 3-D renderings as visual representations of their project.
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