Lennar isn’t just a home construction building company. As of 2023, the company was the second largest home construction company in the United States based on the number of homes sold.
From single family detached houses to condominiums and townhouses, Lennar builds a variety of different types of homes for both today’s and future generations.
What was unique about Lennar was that the team wasn’t simply looking for a product engineering firm to build an app or give its website an overhaul—they were in the midst of evolving their operation to take on a product mindset. The goal: to work more efficiently and gather better data throughout the homebuilding process.
With its recent growth and success, Lennar was hitting a tipping point, and needed an operational platform that provided real-time data and made day-to-day tasks for the team.
The challenge
The team was contending with outdated technology and manual processes, which not only impeded their work, but also made it difficult from an enterprise planning standpoint to understand where and how the company’s resources were being used.
To better manage their data and reduce dependencies on offline processes, they decided to embark on a transformation of their approach to technology and data management at the firm.
The task for HFC? To build this new MVP, which could act as a template for the broader organization and also support Lennar’s team in transitioning to a more product-led organization that focused on building and delivering products that focus on value and acted as a primary driver of growth.
Lennar chose HFC to help them:
- Pull all required data out of its many existing sources so that it could be incorporated into a new, unified system.
- Design and build HomebuilderOS, a scalable operations platform on top of Lennar’s legacy backend systems (like their ERP, project management platform, and CRM).
- Develop a product-led approach for the organization that would help its team transition away from paper-based to digital workflows.
HFC’s approach
This project featured multiple stakeholders, objectives, and deliverables. From a technical, design, and strategic perspective, HFC’s team identified a few challenges that would be key to achieving the results that Lennar’s team wanted.
For this partnership to be successful, some of Lennar’s existing systems and tools had to be modernized first. HFC would also have to embed a team of specialists to work closely with Lennar’s in-house experts and stakeholders, while managing the experience design side of the project.
Close collaboration with internal and external stakeholders - Lennar was being advised by EY (Ernst & Young) through this modernization process, and HFC partnered with stakeholders from both groups throughout the project to ensure their collective vision was being translated into reality.
Embedded teams - HFC assembled a team of full-stack engineers, designers, front-end engineers, and QA specialists.
Data gathering - To lay the foundation for the rest of the project, HFC worked with Lennar’s internal team to pull all the required data out of existing sources in an organized way so that it could be implemented into the new system being built. This was a challenge because many of the existing legacy tools, such as Oracle, were not easy to integrate with or update.
Design and build - The key deliverable was a new internal-facing platform: HomebuilderOS. HFC designed and built a robust web application on Azure, leveraging serverless JS functions, a GraphQL API, MSSQL database, and ReactJS frontend as key components.
The results: A new platform that formed the bedrock for a company-wide digital transformation
Now that the company had new systems in place to manage data in real-time, the organizations could transition away from paper, spreadsheet, and access-based workflows.
Lennar’s coordinators, finance, and concierge associates teams could now log in through a modern and dynamic online experience and easily access up-to-date data that was relevant to their roles by filtering by person, role, department, or region.
Just a few of the outcomes of Lennar’s partnership with HFC:
- A successful digital transformation that powered the transition to a product-led organization, with new standardized operations and procedures
- HomebuilderOS launched in three regions nationwide, setting the stage for the team to scale up and roll out to an additional 40 regions
Beyond improving quantifiable metrics like conversion rates and time saved, Lennar’s partnership with HFC proved out the intangible benefits of digital transformation and how improving the technology and tools can make day-to-day work easier for a team.
Their global team is now able to easily access the data they need, and with HomebuilderOS, they have made significant progress and are set up for continued success on their digital transformation journey.
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