Housing Giants - September 10, 2008 - (Page 14) Tech By Tom Gebes, BuilderMT RecoveRy Plan: Use Technology, DRoP sTaff, gRow Texas builder uses integrated software to go completely paperless — and reduce staff to prepare for growth. Managing a household of a family of four (like mine) is more complicated than it looks. There are schedule conflicts, disagreements to negotiate, transportation to arrange, bills to pay and activities to manage. Now imagine that same household operating with four occupants who each speak a different language. Crazy, right? Each person would need his or her own translator, and every translator would have to speak all the other occupants’ languages. Now imagine a home building business where the departments can’t share information and where each department needs a translator to speak to any other department. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Yet this is what many home builders go through every day. Sales can’t directly “speak,” i.e. share data with, accounting, job superintendents can’t authorize payment for work completed, scheduling can’t talk to anyone, and accountants are left screaming in a language nobody understands. Translators, in the form of man-hour or custom data-migration software, are required to move data from silo to silo. Allowing each department to work on its own software with independent data proliferates “versions of the truth” and causes havoc when it comes time to sort out what was ordered, who was paid by whom, for what house, at what time and 14 housing gianTs.9.10.08 www.housinggianTs.coM http://www.Housinggiants.com
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