Taylor Morrison Homes

Taylor Morrison leverages Hyphen Solutions and its user community to step up to a more efficient warranty process

Collaboration Between Taylor Morrison and Hyphen Solutions Makes Waves for Builders’ Processes

“My favorite part of the warranty module is its seamlessness — the way information passes from the customer through the builder with minimal added information and gets into the trades’ hands so quickly.”
– Director at Taylor Morrison

BuildPro® Delivers the Solution. Taylor Morrison Leverages Hyphen Solutions for a Better Warranty Process

Warranties and continuing service are an important part of what new home buyers expect from residential builders today. For many people, a home is the most expensive purchase they ever make and they don’t want to buy from a company that doesn’t support their product effectively. It’s important for home builders to manage warranty repairs in a timely and responsive way, but this can put a strain on resources and eat into profits if not managed effectively.

“I took it as an opportunity to try out something new that could eventually help us raise the performance of the warranty process across all our divisions.”
– Director at Taylor Morrison

Home building is an industry where profitability is optimized by fine-tuning project management. Executives know the most lucrative builds are those where home projects are well defined and repeatable — making subcontractor scheduling more efficient.

The level of complexity increases significantly when builders look for opportunistic land purchases as they expand their footprint. This means new cost models, new subcontractors and new weather patterns are prone to effect the performance of a build.

Streamlining and operationalizing home builds means superintendents and project managers must be prepared to vigilantly monitor their budgets, local subcontractors, supplies, trades and more.

This process becomes costly when projects are tracked ineffectively. For instance, builders using disconnected project management and billing systems are more likely to make errors in data entry. Likewise, superintendents still relying on paper- based schedules, phone calls and faxes often miss out on profitability trapped in the back and forth.

Quick Facts About Taylor Morrison

• Corporate headquarters are in Scottsdale, Arizona
• 8,000 homes built annually
• Named Builder Magazine’s 2020 Builder of the Year by Hanley Wood | Meyers Research
• Earned the recognition of being America’s Most Trusted® Home Builder for five years in a row

“I’ve been active in Hyphen’s user groups since I started using the solutions. I’ve been fortunate in building relationships in these groups with many other builders. I like to stay in tune with the best practices in the industry and, as I see business needs at Taylor, I can pass on information about how other leading companies are meeting similar challenges.”
– Director at Taylor Morrison

For Home Builder Taylor Morrison, Acquisitions Mean Fast Growth and a Need for Efficient Processes That Can Span Divisions

Taylor Morrison is one of the largest home building companies in the United States, completing more than 8,000 homes annually. In late 2019, it grew half-again in size with the $2.4 billion acquisition of William Lyon Homes, securing Taylor Morrison a sturdy ranking among the nation’s top five home building enterprises.

The William Lyon acquisition, important in itself, was the sixth meaningful acquisition by Taylor Morrison since its IPO in 2013. Even for this company with 100-plus years of experience and evolution, maintaining a high quality of customer service while managing this rapid growth required a special level of organization and communication.

In 2015, Taylor Morrison acquired three regional operations of home builder, Orleans Homes. The Charlotte, Raleigh and Chicago markets consisted of 24 communities and more than 2,000 owned and controlled lots. One of the issues faced by Taylor Morrison’s Director of Field Applications and Support, was finding a new warranty program for the former Orleans’ operations.

The Director had been a Hyphen BuildPro customer since her previous job. When she arrived at Taylor Morrison, the company was using BuildPro in a limited capacity for basic scheduling. However, she knew it could do much more.

“Hyphen has worked really closely with Taylor Morrison, and we have a great relationship. They have provided enhancements we’ve needed along the way and listened to all of our ideas on how we need things to work for us.”
– Director at Taylor Morrison

“Hyphen turned out to be a great partner in this initiative. The development team was amazing at taking our feedback. As we worked through the inevitable questions and challenges in rolling it out, we shared real-world scenarios of what our users were experiencing or why certain functionalities needed to work in certain ways for us. Hyphen’s team was very receptive at taking our feedback and implementing it into the product.”
– Director at Taylor Morrison

Select Roll-Out of New Warranty Module Sparks Productive Teamwork Between Builder and Hyphen

When Taylor Morrison acquired part of Orleans, Hyphen had recently added Warranty Management to their BuildPro solution. Taylor Morrison decided to try out the new module on their three newest divisions. “I suggested Hyphen because I’d been working with the new warranty module from a user group perspective, providing input for it.” The test was a success and BuildPro Warranty Management has since been rolled out to all divisions of Taylor Morrison. Just last year, they introduced the homeowner portal company-wide, so that homeowners could be linked directly into the system, inputting their concerns and accessing information on responses directly.

BuildPro Warranty Management

With BuildPro Warranty Management, all the steps are documented on one platform and everyone involved has access to the same information without delay.

“Before BuildPro, Orleans and some of our other divisions were literally fi elding phone calls and creating lists, tracking information on spreadsheets, trying to keep track of what homeowners were reporting and what open items they had. It was a nightmare to manage that way. And it’s just not what customers have come to expect these days. I can look up what I bought three years ago on Amazon in about a minute. I can fi nd out day or night where my current order is. We need that kind of convenience and accountability in the home building segment now.”
– Director at Taylor Morrison

BuildPro Warranty Management Process:

• Homeowner enters portal with one click and is able to easily describe and submit both comments and photos of concerns.
• Within seconds, a ticket is automatically created within the system and delivered to the warranty coordinator.
• The coordinator sends simple issues to the appropriate trade for resolution or sends more complex issues to customer service representatives in the field.
• The customer representative makes an appointment with the homeowner, reviews the issue and schedules the appropriate trade or trades right from the home via mobile app.
• A request for an appointment goes to the supplier’s back office, where they can confirm scheduling in the system.
• A technician is sent out and performs the repair.
• The technician can capture the homeowner’s signature on the mobile app, confirming that the job has been completed.

BuildPro Warranty Management Benefits:

• Comprehensive information. Information about who did the original work, materials and colors used, etc. are at builders’ and suppliers’ fingertips. The entire life cycle of the home lives in one easy-to-access environment that includes the history of all POs, the work that was performed, documentation on building the home and servicing the warranty.
• Fewer communication errors. Information is passed from person to person — from customer to builder to supplier and back — without needing to be transposed or copied.
• Faster response. An automated process and mobile capabilities cut down the number of steps required and speed up the total response time.
• Effective crisis management. In the case of a crisis, such as COVID-19, when normal operations have been temporarily suspended, the information available in the software allows for smooth strategic planning, such as batching responses to communities for greater efficiency.
• Ongoing enhancement. Builders get regular support from Hyphen, its user’s community and Hyphen development team members who listen carefully to their feedback on how to improve systems and processes.

“We’ve been able to speed up our response time to our customers dramatically.”
– Director at Taylor Morrison

About Taylor Morrison

For home builder Taylor Morrison, acquisitions mean fast growth and a need for efficient processes that can span divisions. Taylor Morrison is one of the largest home building companies in the United States, completing more than 8,000 homes annually.

In late 2019, Taylor Morrison grew half-again in size with the $2.4 billion acquisition of William Lyon Homes, securing Taylor Morrison a sturdy ranking among the nation’s top five home building enterprises. Learn more at www.TaylorMorisson.com.