The Need
Many families see remodeling their home or building extensions as a way to improve their lifestyle and make a home really theirs after buying it from someone else. Too often, though, the renovation process itself becomes complicated, expensive and even risky because of communication breakdowns with the builders during the selection process. As a result, many homeowners spend their own time going from shop to shop looking at huge piles of catalogues to find the necessary materials and units.
RENOMii turned to Softjourn to help find a solution to this problem: together, we developed an application that makes the process of remodeling much smoother and simpler for both the homeowner and the builder.
The Solution
RENOMii chose Softjourn as their development partner to assist them in optimizing their existing renovation service for contractors. Our team`s suggestion was to apply a new more efficient framework, Bootstrap, which would make the enhancing of the system functionality easier. RENOMii also wanted to add more options and functions, such as approval tracking, change order management, upgraded communication between a contractor and a client and project file access.
It took Softjourn`s team about two months to add the new functionality, and develop an upgraded UI design and make it mobile friendly.
Then RENOMii again decided to work with Softjourn to implement new features in this highly successful product.
This time the decision was to offer additional options for homeowners and builders to facilitate the process of remodeling a building.
It took Softjourn’s team only three months to devise new selection features for both sides:
- Builders can add new homeowners and assign specific units to them.
- Homeowners can make basic choices and select options appropriate for them through the Selection page.
- Builders can edit the homeowner’s choice.
- Builders can use a feature to add extra items for homeowners, such as discounts.
- Both sides have a summary page.
- Builders have a choice of 4 reports in HTML and PDF formats.
- Subtotals, totals and Tax (HST) costs are calculated automatically.
- Contact sheets are available in HTML and PDF formats with options for printing and signing.
The Benefits
The result is a simple to use, yet really efficient, mobile friendly service for tracking renovation contract changes, order management, and tracing communication between the client and their contractor.
This solution also puts all the information in one place, reduces paperwork, makes it possible to remotely select items for remodeling, and allows users print the final contract.
