Grayson Homes awarded prestigious 2005 National Homebuilders’ Gold Quality Award, credits new BlackBerry mobile solution

28 December 2004, ELLICOT CITY, MARYLAND: For over 29 years, Grayson Homes Inc has carved an impressive market lead in building single-family residential homes in Maryland. This recognition was recently acknowledged at the U.S. Benchmark Conference in September where Grayson Homes became the latest recipient to be recognized with the 2005 National Housing Quality (NHQ) Gold Award, the highest honor in the industry. The NHQ Awards are styled after the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award administered by the NAHB Research Center, a subsidiary of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and Reed Residential Group, publishers of Professional Builder and Professional Remodeler. “Winning the NHQ Award is the most difficult award to obtain in the industry."

"Grayson Homes is to be commended for creating a company capable of achieving this honor,” said Professional Builder editorial director Heather McCune. According to Grayson Homes president Cynthia McAuliffe, "Grayson Homes is very proud of this award. Our compelling vision for our company is to provide our customers with the highest quality total customer experience, maintaining a customer satisfaction rating of at least 95% throughout the process. The common goal of being the “Builder of Choice” in the Baltimore/Washington area is a company wide commitment by all employees and trade contractors at Grayson Homes,” she said.

The Challenge
The award marked a new phase for Grayson Homes. Less than a year ago, it was troubled to match its paper-based reporting system with its high-quality construction standards. Its manual, paper-based reporting system was used to gather information from inspections of homes under construction. Information such as defects or leakages was fast paced to its contractors and suppliers. However, this information system was entirely dependant on the traditional means of mobile phones and faxes.

Furthermore, this information was manually keyed into a simple database. Project managers can use this database to generate reports and take action on outstanding work. Although this routine worked, top executives at Grayson Homes were worried that its current system may not be able to support its expansion plans and increasing activities.

The resulting improvements and thumbs up given by its field supervisors have convinced Grayson Homes to extend the BlackBerry handhelds to enable its supervisors to offer better customer service with homeowners.

A study of a typical work day at Grayson Homes has indicated many instances where modern wireless communication technology can be put to work. For example, a field supervisor spends hours away from the office at building sites. These supervisors inspect job sites and evaluates that homes are built to Grayson Homes exacting standards. They use forms as a primary means to record defects or construction flaws, then either call, fax or use a two-way radio to contact the relevant trade contractor or supplier to have the flaws rectified.

At the end of the day, supervisors return to the office and use a spreadsheet to record and review their activities of reporting defects and contacting trade contractors and suppliers. To keep track of these inspections, clerks manually type reports into a simple database that Grayson Homes executives use to monitor performance. As the volume of business grew, the paperwork increased and the timeliness of these reports fell. Soon the database held outdated records and worse yet, it provided only a limited perspective on Grayson Homes’ overall business.

The need became apparent. In order to retain its competitive advantage, Grayson Homes must replace its paper-based quality control system with a more efficient solution that can offer a timely overview of their operations.