| Success Story: Macon E. Gooch III Building Consultants |
| Web-Based Commercial/Residential Inspection Management System |
Since 1992, market leader Macon Gooch has performed well over 250,000 inspections, including not only foundations and framing systems, but all mechanical and building finals. The firm has diversified its scope of services to include complete framing plans, structural design, follow-up home inspection reports, remodeling design and specification, FHA foundation inspections, Elevation Certificates and Expert Witness Testimony. Over 250 distinct billable services are offered by the firm. By 2004, however, company's growth had created an overwhelming paperwork handling problem, which created a series of additional downstream challenges.
The company turned to state-of-the-art information technology to solve these problems. Existing off-the-shelf solutions were expensive and inadequate in addressing the company’s unique business rules and distinctive services. In April 2004, they engaged [our company] to create a unique web-based system that supported order handling, field work and back office functions, capturing all job information from the initial customer contact through to the billing process. We invested the resources and time to become familiar with the company’s business and unique complexity, and then the two companies collaborated to build a comprehensive software solution, unequalled in the marketplace.
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| A Lot of Moving Parts |
For every piece of field work, complex forms, each with a myriad of enforced business rules, need to be filled in by the inspector. What was once done manually with paper and fax is now accomplished with a mobile TabletPC device and cellular Internet connection. Photos and scanned documents can be uploaded over the remote Internet connection; even the current local weather conditions are automatically logged by the system. Orders created back in the main office show up immediately and automatically on each inspector’s machine in the field. Pay logs are automatically calculated and available at the main office. In short, the inspector can remain "on station" far longer each day and perform more inspections, without ever having to visit the main office.
Back at the office, incoming orders are created in the system, scheduled and assigned to the appropriate inspector. Legal affidavits, special letters and other documents are automatically created as needed for each order, each with its own complex set of rules according to the type of work done, the county originating the work and other factors. Completed orders are passed through a system process that carefully controls how invoices are electronically posted to the off-the-shelf backend accounting system.
In short, work capacity almost doubled and inspector efficiency and accuracy improved immeasurably. The company now has the resources to pursue new markets and opportunities as never before. Centralized, real time information has given the owners powerful new ways to tune the business and improve profitability.
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| Creativity and Recognition |
Our creativity stood out on this project. We solved tough problems head-on, like:
- Reliably retrieving the current weather for the current location in the field;
- Being able to attach drawings and photos to work orders while using a TabletPC in the field;
- Creating a very powerful user interface that worked well over a low bandwidth connection of varying reliability;
- Implementing web-based spell-checking throughout the system.
A complete web-based system was delivered using our battle-tested software framework and Microsoft Small Business Server,
and developed using HTML, ASP, VBScript, JavaScript, CSS and a COM+ middle tier written in Visual FoxPro 8,
with SQL Server 2000 on the back end.
One unexpected outcome: Macon Gooch won a TAG Excalibur Award in 2006 for "innovative use of technology" by "tech-enabled" companies. The system was judged on a variety of criteria including the scope of the problem solved, the creativity of the technology- enabled solution, return on investment and business results.
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