Once a customer, Dedicated Services General Manager, John Rowe knows all there is to know about the ins and outs of Residential Construction – and how Dedicated Services can provide support to businesses with high workload needs and those looking to expand their teams.
We spoke to him to find out how his 700-strong team are helping Residential Home Builders around the globe deliver quality projects of all shapes and sizes…
I first encountered MiTek when I was working with a structural timber company in Australia more than 12 years ago and was introduced to their services by a frame and truss company. Today, I’m based in Ho Chi Minh City, where I oversee the work delivered for the Residential Homes Builder (RHB) sector around the globe.
Currently our biggest market is in Australia, where we have a diverse spread of customers including the country’s largest house builders. We are also working with customers in the US, New Zealand, France, Austria, and now the UK, so Europe is beginning to take off, too.
Many of our homebuilder clients come to us following recommendations from our MiTek frame and truss customers, who are encouraging them to talk to Dedicated Services about how we can help them. Housebuilders often find once they start working with us there is potential to do more and to use the skills of our teams to streamline their design, estimating, marketing and administration processes.
We have an awesome team of people, mostly graduates from architecture and engineering disciplines. They’re keen to learn, grow their skills, and bring enormous energy and enthusiasm into the mix. We also have graduates who have used CAD software in university, giving us a good head start on training, an important skill for staff joining the RHB team.
What sort of work does this involve?
It’s a real mix of tasks and software (we now use 160 different types of software across the company!) from client to client. For some it could be modeling a new master design, or lot specific construction drawings or it might be a case of converting a whole library of master designs from 2D to 3D.
Conversions have proved to be a very good task for us, repetitive and one that we are well placed to do. We can then also adapt the master to take into account the client’s individual project requirements. For example, it’s a very well-used service in Australia – and probably makes up the bulk of the drafting services provided.
We can also complete custom drawing for smaller customers. For example, we’ve had pencil sketches turned into 3D models and then into walkthrough videos. Once our drafting team have experience in working from this format, it’s amazing what they can create!
A full package of skills.
It’s important that our home builder customers understand that we’re not just about Drafting. We can provide a whole suite of Services for a Home Builder.
By that, I mean we are doing full architecture drawing for construction purposes. We’re producing a full estimate on all the quantities for purchasing for construction. We’re doing 3D renders for marketing – whether that’s facade renders or a full video walkthrough of the house or development project. And look out for our newest addition – Virtual Reality!
Another consideration at play is how we can help the major house builders who often build the same models of property over and over again. We can take on all that back office, repetitious work and leave the builder teams to focus on the more exciting areas. A good point to note for retention of staff by allowing them to focus on the interesting or developing tasks whilst our team completes the day to day repetitious tasks. It also takes pressure off team resources, as well as often being a more cost-efficient approach.
A dedicated service in every sense!
We’re finding that clients who use our services, really like how it works for them, and we’re winning repeat business from them as a result – they know they can trust us to get on with the job at hand and turn things around efficiently and accurately.
Customers who have dedicated personnel working just with them, in truth have staff who simply become one of the customers team. Our staff are proud to work for our customers. It seems working remotely is now a part of every business.
What’s, the typical project from a house builder?
It varies. For some of the major builders we’ll ‘touch’ their drawings three or four times, we’ll do the preliminary sketch, then they’ll do the preliminary permitting. Then they’ll get a contract signed and then the customer will choose their colours and products. At each of these stages we’re updating the drawings and quantities.
The Advantages
We always ask our customers: Where is your bottleneck? Where is your need? Where are you losing time? We work backwards from that and identify just what needs to be done to address the problem. Having someone, or a team, dedicated to your business needs is really important as this is the best way for us to help clients work out what’s slowing things down. Sometimes it’s down to poor documentation or incomplete processes, and we can help sort this out.
The day-to-day interaction and communication is critical. It can be as simple as finding ways to share large 3D design files and setting up chat groups on Teams. Having someone within the business who is prepared to work alongside us is also vital – an advocate!
A lot of our current business is coming through referrals, particularly as individuals change companies and would like their new employer to give us a chance. We’re also getting new customers coming to us in search of a better quality service – something we think you can only really deliver and maintain in the longer term with a dedicated resource that’s focused just on their customer.
At the very least, Give us a try! There are no initial costs if you just want to trial the service, I’d really encourage anyone who has a need to contact us. We are very open and welcome visitors to our unique facilities in Vietnam at any time, highly recommend, I did this 12 years ago and it was a game changer.
Our team are ready to welcome you to the MiTek Services family.
