Company Overview
Based in Lombard Illinois, Town & Country Homes is one of the largest and most successful homebuilders in the nation, with divisions in Chicago and Minneapolis. The company prides itself on providing cutting-edge home design and quality construction based on the latest advances in home building science.

Town & Country Homes has received numerous awards for its work including the National Award for Construction Excellence from Home Owner’s Warranty Corporation and was recently named Residential Contractor of the Year by the Residential Construction Employer Council.

Synopsis
The Town and Country Homes construction team is consistently managing hundreds of construction schedules for single and multi-family homes in their various communities. These schedules are typically maintained in spreadsheets by the construction managers. Each manager has to create the schedules using ‘cut and paste’ and manually updating information about the customer, lot etc. The activities in the schedule must then be adjusted by hand whenever a construction schedule changes due to delays.

The trades and vendors call the managers for information about scheduling, lots and specifics about the homes being built.

Weekly reports that need construction schedule dates must be updated manually and requires a lot of manual communication between the construction team and corporate.

Solution
Triton-Tek built a web-based, AJAX enabled construction scheduler application that greatly automated the construction scheduling process and reporting.

The construction utilizes a template driven scheduling system that allows the operations managers to build a typical schedule for each community and floor plan. This schedule template is then used to automatically create the activities and dates for a new home sale immediately. The system maintains the dates for the construction team using a cascading effect whenever an activity date is updated. This keeps the entire home schedule up to date without the manager having to manually adjust dozens of dates each time a change in the schedule occurs.

The user interface allows the managers to view the schedules for their communities in many different formats such as weekly and monthly calendar.

The trades and vendors are also given read-only access to the scheduler so they can now get scheduling information from the web site rather than have to call the management team.

All corporate reports were updated to pull information directly from the scheduling application. This greatly simplified the reporting process and keeps the reports current.

Results
Since the launch of the Construction Scheduler, Town and Country has automated many manual processes and streamlined construction scheduling.

Significant benefits include:

• Vast reduction in time Construction Managers are spending updating schedules and reports.
• Vast Reduction in time Construction Managers are spending communicating scheduling information to trades and vendors.
• Automation of reports that rely on schedule information.
• Better control and consistency of construction schedules company wide.
• Higher level of accountability of the construction team and the trades.

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