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Jayman Homes was building 100 houses a year until it decided to go fast – now it builds 1,000.
“We invested in software called Fast Management to handle all of our purchasing and scheduling of our work,” says Jay Westman, chairman and CEO of the Calgary-based home-building firm.
“It basically turned our superintendents, who worked in a rough-and-tough, command-and-control world, into modern project managers,” he says.
“It doesn’t save a lot in terms of the number of people you need to work, but saves time and improves accuracy,” Mr. Westman adds.
Jayman Homes, founded in 1980, is Alberta’s largest home builder. The company, with 270 employees, started in Calgary and has built homes in Edmonton and the United States and at one point, it shipped homes in containers for assembly in Japan.
It was an exponential leap to increase house production tenfold. “It wasn’t easy,” Mr. Westman says. “It took us almost a decade to perfect. We started the whole process in 1995.”
While today there are cloud-based project management systems that builders use, software in 1995 was, well, in the last century. There were no smartphones or tablets, and the big tech breakthrough that year was the launch of Windows 95.
Jayman’s supervisors now walk around with laptops, smartphones or tablets, or they input data at the building site office into computers using Fast Management’s up-to-date software.
Fast Management is a division of Constellation Homebuilder Systems Inc., headquartered in Markham, Ont., which now owns and manages a number of construction software companies and has more than 125,000 customers in 100 countries. Using Fast Management adds about $150 to the cost of each house, but it more than makes up for this in time saved and the ability to track construction progress and supplies, Mr. Westman says.
Keep reading this article in The Globe and Mail
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