Grayson Homes Streamlines Construction Defect Tracking

Headquarters: Maryland
Sector: Construction, Homebuilding
Function: Quality management and project management
Solution: Sub-contractor activity tracking and defect management
Benefits: Improved quality and customer satisfaction due to enhanced
contractor effectiveness and supervisor productivity

Challenge

A mid-sized homebuilder, Grayson Homes builds 200 to 300 homes per year. A staff of 54 serves customers and manages trade contractors in the Maryland area. A typical day on the job for a Grayson field supervisor involves hours away from the office at a building site.

As the frontline in quality management, field supervisors walk job sites checking to see that homes are built to Grayson's exacting standards. Originally a paper-based reporting system was used to inspect houses under construction and report back to trade contractors and suppliers on defects that needed to be resolved.  Any defects were noted on paper by field supervisors who would return to the office to use a desktop computer spreadsheet to enter and review defects and either call, fax or two-way radio a trade contractor or supplier to resolve defects.

Grayson Homes needed to replace a paper-based quality control system that tracked and measured trade contractor performance with a more efficient wireless solution. At the same time, they needed a real-time database that offered an instant overview of their business.

Solution

Grayson worked with ATSG, a Maryland-based technology management company, to build a fully mobile system using Flowfinity for mobile forms, queries and updates to server information.

Using Flowfinity, information is wirelessly pushed to the smartphone automatically when the central database is changed. As the construction supervisor enters data on their smartphone, updates are sent wirelessly to the central server where the database is updated immediately.

When the supervisor is out of wireless coverage and not connected, they can use the application to capture and update the job status. All updates are automatically sent to the server as soon as the user returns to an area with wireless coverage.

"The ability to capture all this data, sift through it easily and get to information that allows you to make improvements, is key to our competitive position in the marketplace."

Results

This robust interactive mobile solution enhances the field supervisor's ability to track, manage and resolve defects from their smartphone, wherever they are working. It also provides a superior database and management reporting system that gives the company a comprehensive view of their business. The solution provides significant quality and productivity benefits, including:

• Reduced paperwork, phone calls and manual inputting of reports
• Increased field supervisor efficiency
• Greatly improved visibility of contractor performance
• Improved trade contractor effectiveness
• Superior quality assurance