Housing Giants - April 10, 2008 - (Page 20)

end to what we learn about people from the customizing choices they make.” BOMB THE SILOS One thing the company learned about developing close, personal relations with customers is that those relationships don’t happen in a big home building company organized into functional departments. “We decided to get rid of those silos by breaking the company down into smaller business units, each with a leader having full profitand-loss responsibility,” Horne says. He reasons that builders with under $25 million in annual revenue are small enough to have multi-disciplined teams that get close to the customer. So Wilshire is now a collection of business units with those same characteristics. “We centralize finance, design, estimating and purchasing,” he says. “We have a home creation team that designs a customized house plan for every customer from the red-lined plan that comes in from the sales office.” The salespeople are “new home consultants” trained to help customers find the custom solutions that fit the home to their lifestyle. Land acquisition is not centralized. That’s handled by the business units, just as if each one is a small building firm. Initially, warranty service was centralized, but now that function has moved out into the business units as well. “But we still have a headquarters group of warranty specialists to handle issues that get past a timeline that we regard as normal,” Horne says. “If a warranty issue is a year old, it needs more attention.” ‘BUILT AROUND YOU’ The computerized design, estimating and purchasing system is Wilshire’s claim to fame. If this isn’t the Holy Grail, it’s very close. It took Wilshire three years to merge a three-dimensional CAD system that spits out quantities of materials and products with custom-programmed estimating software called Expert Estimating System that performs the calculations to fill the gaps the CAD system doesn’t reach. The resulting system — Built Around You — is what Wilshire’s new home consultants use to create and price customized plans right in the sales office. The firm’s advertising hammers it home: “Everything we do is built around you!” Wilshire buys everything, including the labor of its trades in units of measure —by the installed piece, square foot, cubic foot, etc. This unit pricing is critical to electronic pricing of custom changes. “As the plan is marked and changed, those quantities are picked up, if not by the CAD system, then by EES,” Horne explains. “It will translate the number of square feet on a wall into how many studs, sheets of plywood and bricks we need to buy — right down to the 20 HOUSING GIANTS.4.10.08 WWW.HOUSINGGIANTS.COM http://www.caddprimer.com/library/ http://www.housingzone.com/probuilder/article/CA6384963.html http://www.wilshire-homes.com/why-wilshire/wilshire-built-around-you/ http://WWW.HOUSINGGIANTS.COM

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Housing Giants - April 10, 2008 Contents Viewpoint News and Moves Market CEO Spotlight The New Housing Demographics

Housing Giants - April 10, 2008

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