The president of Choice Homes was concerned that the company could do a better job of communicating about the status of houses in process, and in particular about scheduling and ordering the materials and labor for the houses. We started a project in late 1997 called BuildPro98, which was an integration of PC and Palm applications. After six months of coding and testing, we concluded that we could not use this technology to address that problem at that time. It required more computer savvy than most superintendents could supply. Some flourished, others foundered. Also, at that time, before the modern reflective screens, it was hard to read the Palm Pilots in bright sunlight, which was where the superintendents needed to see them.
Most interesting business challenge: mapping the data structures from the corporate servers, to the local pc's, to the handheld computers. The local superintendents only needed data for houses in process. The other challenge was getting high quality information about the lead times and lag times to make scheduling meaningful.
Most interesting technical challenge: a one click entry to record that an item was complete. We had no difficulty moving the information from SQL Server to local MS Access applications. Using VBA to create appointments and tasks in outlook was more difficult but largely a matter of typing carefully when we coded. We just reversed the procedure later. It was clear that the future of homebuilding involved transitioning the superintendents from labor foremen to knowledge workers, but we couldn't implement it in 1998. It was also fun to code the PO routine, which would either print, fax, or email a purchase order based on present vendor information.
Buzzwords: Palm, VBA, MS Access, MS Exchange, Windows NT, Windows CE, Workflow.