After a years-long development process involving feedback from heavy home builder involvement and feedback, Constellation HomeBuilder Systems launched its latest enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, NX. The all-in-one, full-integrated platform is built to meet the unique needs of production home builders and future-proof their business for years to come.
The NX modules span the full spectrum of the home building journey, from land management and acquisition through to the customer experience and warranty.
“Built from the ground up, NX is the most advanced, most intuitive, and most comprehensive home builder platform available,” says Bob Swainhart, vice president of the enterprise solutions group at Constellation HomeBuilder Systems, who led development efforts of NX in collaboration with a series of Constellation home builder and developer partners.
The ERP solution empowers home builders to gain efficiencies, manage costs, communicate effectively with the trades, and streamline processes.
Ahead of the launch, BUILDER spoke with Swainhart and Chris Graham, president of Constellation HomeBuilder Systems, about the development and capabilities of NX and the value of the ERP system to the home building industry.
Can you share more about NX and what makes the solution unique?
Swainhart: NX is the first complete, end-to-end system built specifically for builders. It is a true enterprise, cloud-based ERP platform that is designed for home builders to run their entire business on.
It starts from the acquisition of raw land through the development of that land into actual communities. When home builders are ready to begin selling and building homes in a community, NX manages the entire process from budgeting, purchasing, sales and marketing, design center functionality, scheduling, the home-close process, post-closing warranty, and so on—all while “keeping score” with a native finance and accounting module.
When you start the construction of the home, you need a strong scheduling capability, vendor portals and, as our modern home builders demand, the home buyer needs to be kept in the loop on their home’s progress. Our home buyer portals enable real-time, two-way communication between the builder and homeowner around everything from community activities to the status of their construction during the build cycle. Post-closing, home buyers can manage all their warranty needs and have access to critical information such as the types of products that were installed, paint colors, and the history around their home-buying journey.
What was the development process like for the system and how was it catered to alleviate pain points for home builders?
Graham: We worked very closely with our builders for many years. Since we became part of Constellation Software Inc. in 2004, we’ve had very strong, transparent relationships with our customers, where they tell us what they’d like to see, what we could do better, and where we should be taking them in the future. We built a team that is highly responsive to our customers’ needs.
NX came about based on Constellation’s long-term focus on the home building industry; we’re not focused on next month or next quarter, we’re focused on the years to come and making sure that our customers can rely on us to provide a business system that they can use forever. Part of that discussion was around building a system that they could migrate to over time. We’re always going to support our existing products and give our customers that stability. Over time we expect new customers who are not part of Constellation will move from their older accounting systems to NX. They may have more urgency, and we can support that need.
Our early adopter customers spent a significant amount of time using the new system. We hold weekly or monthly calls with them to explain what we have done and what we are doing. In turn, they provided feedback on these development efforts as we built the product. It was a very open and transparent process. Over this period we’ve developed some great friendships and partnerships with our customers while we’ve been building NX.
What is the process of building an ERP system from the ground up?
Graham: We’ve been in the industry for a long time and we have some very experienced members of our team who have worked with builders and in different areas of the industry. We have team members who’ve led departments for home builders; they know what systems should do and they know what’s lacking in systems that already exist.
When it came to designing NX, we wanted to take a fresh approach in some areas, but also balance builder expectations and core functionality that builders need in the system. For example, you need to be able to generate a sales contract, you need to be able to issue purchase orders, you need to be able to manage pricing, you need to be able to manage the customer experience. All these things the new system needed to be able to, but there are ways we can optimize it and make it easier for people to use, make it easier for IT professionals to deploy the system, make it easier to train new users on, make it easier to manage the whole building ecosystem from field staff to sales agents to vendors and home buyers. There’s a lot that we took from our knowledge, but we also did things differently to make it more scalable and to make the volume of data easier to manage for builders and IT teams.
Is there a volume of production for a home builder that best aligns with the NX platform?
Swainhart: Our customer base is expansive. It includes builders who build five to 15,000 homes a year. They may sell in multiple countries, in multiple regions, and in different cities. Our customers may build different styles of homes, from attached product to detached single family. We provide a system that supports that entire spectrum. NX is built to scale as a builder’s business grows and evolves.
Migrations and system decisions are big processes within our customer base and in the industry overall. What we want is for builders to know that we have a powerful, modern system that’s ready for them when they are, and they can trust us to help run their business.
What do you believe is the value of NX and what makes it the right time to come to market?
Graham: NX provides an opportunity for builders to simplify the processes they have within their company. Some systems have a lot of functionality and complexity. Builders are doing things in their systems because that is the way they have always done it. We offer a way to simplify and make doing hard things a little bit easier.
Going back to first principles may help here. Every business should be trying to improve the efficiency of their team and departments. Not only does that apply to the sales or construction process, but it also applies to IT management and to managing the data that our systems store. We’ve done a good job of simplifying and democratizing the data. Data is given to the people that need to make decisions and we made sure that everyone is looking at the same data. That’s a big part of where we think things can be a little easier.
Swainhart: From the beginning, we knew that if there can be an improved way of doing things systematically, we wanted it incorporated into the system design.
I’ll use purchasing as an example. If you go to builders today, regardless of what system they are using, they’re replicating a lot of data. They are building the same plan and elevation over and over again in multiple cities and regions. Some of the systems will require that they replicate that same plan and elevation data instead of building it once and managing any exceptions. For instance, let’s imagine the sales price of that same plan and elevation is the same in every single market except for one. Instead of having to rebuild that plan and elevation in 30 markets, with NX you can build it once and then manage any unique sales prices or cities. You’re now managing by exception and inheriting all the data that has been built one time to the greatest extent possible.
As a result, the purchasing team has less data to maintain. As large production builders grow and scale, they have a huge amount of data to maintain and manage when they decide to make a change to a sales price or the price of a 2x4 that ends up in every plan and elevation in the company. The number of places where they have to maintain that data and update that information can be overwhelming and very time consuming. With NX, you’re going to be able to effortlessly streamline the data management process all because from day one, before a line of code was even written, the thought we had was: ‘We need to make our builders more efficient, and we need to streamline everything that they do so they spend less time in the system and more time focusing on their business.’
Are there any final thoughts about NX that are relevant to note?
Swainhart: This is a years-long effort that no one else in the industry from a technical standpoint is in a position to deliver for the industry. This is indicative of Constellation’s long-term commitment to home building. We are forever investors in the space, and we have time horizons that allow for multi-year projects to happen. If you talk to our customers, they will tell you that we’re a technology partner that they trust to be able to deliver solutions that the industry will need today and in the future.
Graham: These relationships are two-way. We trust our home builder partners and they trust us. We do what we say we are going to do and that’s a big part of how we approached the development of NX. Not only do we take a long-term approach, but the feedback is very candid and open. We’ve made a great system as a result. We don’t think anyone else would have the patience or the long-term dedication to do that.
