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Continued . . . . 
Building Products November/December 1999
All Aboard More and more builders are going online to strengthen their business and boost profits By Gerry Donohue A Product Research Tool "The Web is absolutely perfect for product research," says Savage. "And the manufacturers seem to have figured that out." With the unlimited capacity of the Web, a manufacturer's entire catalog can be just a mouse click away. Whether you're looking for the specs of a particular product or merely browsing, you can glean information from the Web that might have taken days or even weeks had you been using the telephone or the mail. "I use the Web very much for research," says Jim Seymour, president of Seymour Homes in Holland, Mich. "It's an excellent source of information." Recently, Seymour needed to buy some fencing. He found the Hoover Fence Web site (www.hooverfence.com ), which not only provided comprehensive measuring and building information, but also allowed him to order online. In one recent week, custom builder Eriech Horvath used the Web twice to conduct product research. First, he visited the Rumford Fireplace site (www.rumford.com ) to get information for a client, and then he went to the Flexicore Systems site (www.flexicore.com ) to get some concrete load data. "You can get information so quickly," says Horvath. "And there's so much out there." U.S. Home's site will soon link to the sites of several manufacturers, such as General Electric and Masco, allowing U.S. Home buyers to learn about the companies' products and materials. Eventually, says Kelly Somoza, U.S. Home will put its entire options catalog on its Web site, with links to the appropriate manufacturers. For builders, the ultimate use of the Web would be ordering all the materials for a house online. "That's the killer app," says Savage. "I would get online quotes from my local dealer in real time. I could log on and look at the dealer's SKUs, order what I needed, and have it arrive tomorrow morning on the site. And it would all be integrated with my accounting system." Given the Web's rapid pace of evolution, such an application probably isn't too far off. Competitive Edge The current evolutionary edge of the Web for builders is project-specific Web sites. Builders create a Web site for each home they are building and put all the information about that house on that site. The owner, vendors, trades, and the contractor's employees can use the site to stay current on the progress of the house. "You can restrict access to different parts of the site to different people," says CDCI's Geoffroy, who in March introduced a project-specific Web site program for builders. "You can have plans, specs, directives, change orders, photographs. Everything anybody needs to know about the house." Builders who have CDCI's management software can even integrate their accounting systems with their project-specific Web sites at CDCI, allowing them to do cost reporting and other financial analysis online. "Project-specific Web sites are a competitive edge right now," says Geoffroy. "We see this application expanding rapidly." Creating a project-specific Web site requires a significant level of Web expertise or third-party management. At his Web site, Todd Wacome has developed a system that achieves many of the goals of a project-specific Web site with none of the complications. Wacome's site lists all the public information about his homes. The site's cover page merely lists buttons for his four or five houses under construction. Going to one of the homes reveals a surprising depth of information. Pushing the button for Lot 45B, for instance, brings up a recent photo of the house, a list of all the permits and inspection dates, links to the floor plans, complete specs for every room in the house, and a list of change orders. "When we started it, we were a little worried about the vulnerability," says Wacome. "People could randomly find this information. But all of this information is public anyway. We've put it up in our houses for years. This is just a much better way of doing it. We have much more control." Both customers and trades frequently use the site. "We list the ceiling finishes by room," says Wacome. "Our plasterers start early in the morning and a lot of times they would call if they had a question on a room. Now, they check the Web site before they head out." Customers, he says, "feel like they're more in the loop. They're not watching their house being built from the outside. It's added to their confidence level." Wacome has gained all these advantages with very little effort. "It took us about 10 hours to figure out how to create the pages, and 10 minutes a day to maintain them," says Wacome, who had no prior Web experience. "And we do it all on an old 386 computer with DOS software." Builders around the country are mirroring Wacome's experiences. The World Wide Web is a very forgiving technology. You don't have to be the first or be an expert to prosper. In fact, because it's evolving so fast, you can climb on the Web at any time and with any level of expertise, and still take advantage of its numerous applications. Given such a flexible opportunity, why wait? At almost any level of participation, the Web will almost immediately make your business better and easier to manage. Gerry Donohue is a Silver Spring, Md.-based freelance writer and former senior editor at Builder magazine. REPRINTED FROM BUILDING PRODUCTS, November/December 1999 COPYRIGHT 2000. Hanley-Wood, LLC All Rights Reserved. |
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