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
Town & Country Homes Purchase Order process was based on a back office system called FAST. This system
maintains all financial and purchase order data for all trades and vendors. The processing of purchase
orders is a very manual process and requires the printing and mailing of many hundreds of POs and supplemental
documents every week. Additionally, POs must first be approved by the construction team before they can be
paid. Once a week, construction managers from each community must physically transport the PO approval log
book to the corporate headquarters for processing.
After investigating several costly automation options with FAST, Town & Country asked Triton-Tek to
investigate the possibility of integrating their construction scheduler application
with FAST.
Solution
Triton-Tek not only was able to integrate seamlessly with FAST, they were also able to completely automate
the PO approval process.
Triton-Tek built a nightly process that pulls all PO data from the FAST system and exports it to Teamworks.
This allowed trades and vendors to login to the web based Teamworks and retrieve all approved POs and print
them for processing. Triton-Tek was also able to retrieve cancellation and payment information giving the
trades even more information than would normally get in the manual process. The Purchase Order printout were
improved and enhanced beyond what the FAST system could produce. All supplemental documentation was also
placed online so the trades and vendors can download and print it directly from their location.
Additionally, the Construction Scheduling system was enhanced to allow the construction
managers the ability to approve POs online. A reporting interface was created for the Accounts Payable team
to be able to view which activities were complete on the field. A sophisticated search interface allowed
them to easily find the approvals rather than have to manually scan through a log book.
Results
Since the launch of the PO Management system, Town and Country has automated several manual processes and
streamlines the accounts payable process with their trades.
Significant benefits include:
- Vast reduction in printing and postage costs of POs and contracts.
- Vast reduction in employee time spent processing POs.
- Significant reduction in calls from Trades to get status on POs and payment information.
- Elimination of manual PO logging and transportation.
- Enhanced PO information is now available online for all trades.
- Advanced searching of PO repository beyond existing Back Office system.
- Faster PO approval / processing time.
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