Custom Home Builder Uses Electronic Document Management to Construct Operational Excellence

First to go are the piles of paper, replaced by digital document workflows that streamline key business processes

Granite Ridge Builders is the largest custom home builder in Fort Wayne, IN and also builds in the Indianapolis metro area. As a small-to-medium business (SMB) in the custom home building industry, Granite Ridge operates in an environment subject to changing economic conditions. In the face of uncertain market conditions, Granite Ridge wanted to create highly cost-effective operations and looked to technology for help. Business overhead is the only metric which Granite Ridge can totally control.

Reducing piles of paper and creating streamlined workflows using electronic document management software delivers meaningful cost savings for any business. However, Granite Ridge was seeking innovative ways to extend document management to better navigate the unpredictable home builder business environment and make operations run more efficiently.

Granite Ridge Builders uses CNG-SAFE and CNG-Books company-wide

In 2005 Granite Ridge selected Cabinet NG as the firm’s digital document management provider after reviewing competing systems that were more costly and less flexible.

CNG-SAFE® (Shared Access Filing Environment), the preeminent document management system for SMBs, became the foundation of Granite Ridge’s gains in productivity and bottom-line savings through streamlined document management and efficient business workflows.

The builder began using CNG-Books®, an award winning integrated document management solution for Intuit's QuickBooks® that merges document filing and data entry into a single process. CNG-Books transformed Granite Ridge’s paper-centric workflows into an automated and centralized electronic document management process across its marketing, construction and accounting departments.

Cabinet NG's rules-based workflows helped Granite Ridge control its business costs in two key areas. First, CNG-Books helped the firm save “thousands” of dollars by avoiding double paying of vendors according to Aline Urschel, Construction Accountant at Granite

Ridge Builders. Secondly, producing easily compared digital job cost reports made the cost analysis of Granite Ridge homes much more efficient and helped the builder plan more effectively.

In a SMB environment, new technology must gain acceptance and immediate widespread use in order to generate positive ROI. “The visual impact of being able to see invoices scanned into our Cabinet NG electronic document management system has been immensely effective in multiple ways,” said Aline Urschel of Granite Ridge Builders. “Viewing an actual invoice makes the software easy to use for all our employees, as this mimics our old paper-based processes; and the ability to retain images of invoices has significantly cut back on waste due to double paying and other clerical errors.”

Currently, 20 users throughout the firm are using CNG-SAFE and CNG-Books to share documents, streamline business processes, and eliminate paper and storage space. Granite Ridge will soon be applying CNG-SAFE workflow improvements to its paper-based decorator sheets used to customize Granite Ridge homes.

Over 50 pages long with 300 questions, the decorator sheets are physically cumbersome as well as logistically challenging. Updating the decorator, Granite Ridge’s accounting department and the potential buyer with decorating choice changes was a battle quickly being lost. The decorating sheets often eluded Granite Ridge’s Quality Control process, resulting in erroneous final home price calculations. “Too many $500 doors were being given away due to mistakes made from paper-based document mismanagement,” added Urschel.

Granite Ridge is working to arm their decorators with laptops running Cabinet NG’s electronic document management software to help finalize the decorating sheets – and the new home price – at the time of purchase. In doing so, Granite Ridge expects to shrink the decorating process from six weeks to four.

Next step: New import feature used to extend efficiencies across accounting platforms

In the face of fluctuating interest rates, consumer spending confidence and changes in housing supply and demand, Granite Ridge Builders has leveraged CNG-SAFE and CNG-Books to gain insight and maintain balance across the areas of the custom home building business that can be controlled.

With Cabinet NG’s automated electronic document management, the builder streamlined its accounting processes to save money, and instituted workflow processes to make key aspects of the business such as job costing and home customization work much more effectively.

Granite Ridge is now deploying a new customized import feature to automate billing workflows with key suppliers, starting with Home Lumber. This feature automatically imports billing data and image files from a vendor into the local accounting system and CNG-SAFE.

By helping key trading partners share transaction data and images across accounting platforms, Cabinet NG created an integrated billing system that cuts down on errors while speeding up invoicing. By extending these benefits to their supplier Home Lumber, Granite Ridge gains the streamlined accounting efficiencies typically enjoyed by large corporate EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) systems, but at a fraction of the cost.

“Cabinet NG is continually innovating to save us money, most recently by helping us integrate our billing processes with one of our biggest suppliers, Home Lumber,” said Tony Reincke, President of Granite Ridge, “Initial results from the new import feature have been so overwhelmingly positive that we plan to automate billing workflows with other suppliers, and Home Lumber plans to do the same with its large customers.”