Green Management Creates A Healthier Bottomline

At its most basic, the movement towards green construction and towards “green” products and lifestyle in general, is all about the conservation of resources. The ideas of sustainability, efficiency, ecological impact, and low carbon footprint are changing virtually every aspect of residential construction. The design of communities, homes, and landscaping has been altered dramatically throughout the last five years based on green building concepts. And of course, construction products that can offer sustainability and resource efficiency are in increasingly greater demand.

What’s disappointing about this movement is the as-yet unrealized prospect of reduced costs and increased profits for the builder and developer. Theoretically, sustainable design, construction, and product selection should result in lower costs based on reduced energy consumption and arguably lower maintenance requirements. In practice, many of the cost returns for green construction remain intangible and accrue to the long-term end-user of the product far more than to the builder or developer.

Green Management Offers Return on Investment Now and Later
However, there is one area of green business practice that returns substantial savings directly to the builder and developer immediately and continually. That area is the application of green management practices within the building process. By applying the same concepts of sustainability, efficiency, and low carbon footprint to everyday management practices, builders across the country are realizing substantial reductions in operating costs and significant improvements in net profitability.

Address All Areas of Cost and Efficiency
We’re not just talking about recycled paper here (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Sure, paper use is a big part of green management, but an effective program looks at the efficient use of every resource.

Do you the most expensive resource a construction company uses? The answer is people. Personnel costs traditionally make up by far the greatest percentage of overhead and G&A (general and administrative) costs. Fortunately, a properly applied information management system can reduce or eliminate both paper costs and personnel costs.

Consider that the construction of just one house typically results in the generation of more than 400 separate pieces of paper, excluding plans. While the cost (both financial and environmental) of the paper is a factor, a bigger factor is that each one of those pieces of paper is handled by multiple people at different times, often in different locations. Perhaps even more importantly, the information on those pieces of paper is often crucial to the accurate construction of the home, yet is rarely available to the person who needs it in a timely fashion. What is masquerading here as a paper management problem is really an information problem. The challenge is this: How do we get the knowledge previously stored on 400 pieces of paper into the hands of the people who need it, when they need it, without the paper?

MARK SYSTEMS Offers Out-of-the-box Green Management
MARK SYSTEMS’ customers have been enjoying great success in doing just that. By utilizing the power and transparent information delivery capabilities of MARK SYSTEMS’ Integrated Homebuilder Management System, companies like K. Hovnanian, www.khov.com, Red Bank, N.J., have improved construction efficiency while saving thousands of dollars. According to Ken Gill, implementation manager, K. Hovnanian’s Southeast Region, taking advantage of MARK SYSTEMS’ Web-based work order distribution saved more than $6,000 per month in postage in the Virginia communities alone. Along with the elimination of 200,000 pieces of paper, and personnel savings of one full man day per week, that single change in just one state resulted in a real dollar gain of more than $80,000 annually.

MARK SYSTEMS’ IHMS addresses each of the main stumbling blocks to effective green construction management by: 

• Capturing outside physical documents via Document Library Management and storing them as integral parts of the knowledge base

• Eliminating the generation of physical documents by giving team members realtime access to stored information

• Transparently distributing organization knowledge to every team member, regardless of location, via Web and mobile Web

• Eliminating the redundancy often found in homebuilder organizations by utilizing a single knowledge base with all processes integrated at the data element level

• Improving communications between team members by implementing process flow concepts directly into the knowledge base

Real-Life Results
Savvy builders are not just using MARK SYSTEMS’ software to reduce costs – they’re also using it to improve profits in a challenging market. According to Ange Knox, manager of information technology, Heartland Homes, www.loveheartland.com, Lawrence, Pa., implementing the Custom Option Estimator component within the IHMS Purchasing and Sales modules allowed Heartland to become the largest custom homebuilder in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.

“To stay on top of the market, we had to transition from being a production-oriented builder to being a very custom builder. Using MARK SYSTEMS’ Sales Office/Design Center components, and particularly the Custom Option Estimator, helped us grow our market share from 8% to over 14% in just the last year,” says Knox. She adds that Heartland has used IHMS to quote and track more than 6,500 unique custom options since its implementation, with more than 60% of the estimated options being selected for purchase. In fact, one home buyer included more than 80 separate custom options in his final selections.

The bottomline is, of course, the bottomline. Reducing costs while improving information flow, construction quality, and profitability are real, achievable goals with the right tools in place. Now more than ever, builders across the country are finding that MARK SYSTEMS’ Integrated Homebuilder Management System gives them the tools they need to compete, survive, and prosper.

Take Action Now, When You Need It Most 

For more information, visit http://www.marksystemsusa.com, email us at info@marksystemsusa.com, or call us at 800-972-7444.