Client is a family-owned, leader in residential housing framing construction. The company is an innovator in framing construction and works with many of Arizona’s largest home construction companies.

Business Problem: As the Arizona construction market continues to grow, the company is preparing its back-office systems to support the next period of growth. Like many construction companies, they use a number of off the shelf and custom-built applications including sophisticated spreadsheets to run their business. Many of the systems are not properly documented and are not running current versions of the applications. Equally, the systems are dispersed and are running on a number of systems. With a rapidly growing business, system reliability is critical, requiring a quality on-going maintenance and support program for their environment.

Solution Provided: DHX was asked to assess the current environment for the following purposes: 1) Create and document the current state. 2) Provide recommendations to upgrade the current systems to a common version and platform level. 3) Provide recommendations regarding computer system platforms, hosting environment, back-up and archive and a method of ongoing support and maintenance.

Complete documentation was provided including workflow, data flow, database schema, application upgrade strategy, as well as onsite and cloud options for the system. Moreover, the applications have been converted to current versions, the databases have been updated and the organization is now consistent across the board. Backup and archival strategy has been designed and implemented minimizing storage requirements and maximizing security for the business.

Business Benefits: The upgraded environment provides the client with the ability to run several more years without the need for a costly “rip and replace” of their systems. Instead of focusing on back office efforts, they can close and deliver more business without the business disruption of new systems. With everyone on the same version of software, ongoing support for the business has been minimized. The environment is documented for when issues do present themselves. The backup and archival strategy keeps their storage requirements low and provides them with the peace of mind should and unexpected event occur.