MINTO GROUP

Background

Established in 1955, the Minto Group is a fully integrated real estate development, construction and management company. Minto has developed over 1.5 million square feet of commercial real estate in addition to building almost 60,000 homes. With a long, successful history of managing its own diverse portfolio of properties, Minto is able to offer an experienced team and dynamic infrastructure to other real estate owners.

Challenge

The use of technology is what links all of Minto Development’s disparate businesses together and what has helped this family-run company to continue expanding. Roger Greenberg, CEO of Minto says technology has significantly improved the bottom line. “We don’t try to be on the bleeding edge of the curve, but we certainly try to be slightly ahead of the curve in terms of the use of technology.”

Over the last decade, Minto has focused on technology to run their back office operations, using a combination of legacy systems, industry specific tools and off-the-shelf productivity tools. The business had progressed tremendously, but the management still felt they were failing to reduce costs and boost productivity. Consequently, they detailed five areas of opportunity, first of which was PDI – Post Delivery Inspections, where a builder denotes any outstanding defects during the walk-through with a client.

“One of the reasons we chose to start with automating the PDI was because it was customer facing,” said Bob Ridley, Director of Information Technology at Minto. “We felt that our homeowners would feel better about us as a builder if they saw us recording defects on a tablet and trust that the work would get done.”

Solution

Fraser Arrol, Business Analyst at Minto, was assigned the task of finding a solution to automate the PDI process. Arrol approached FieldWorker and set up an information session with representatives in all areas of the business. Managers came looking for a solution to the department’s work management processes and left with an understanding of the concept behind FieldWorker’s mobile application platform and how readily configured mobile applications could simplify their business practices.

FieldWorker Enterprise was chosen as Minto’s mobile platform and a project plan was designed to meet the following business requirements:

• Pilot to launch within 2 weeks
• Internal resources to shadow FieldWorker consultants to maximize knowledge transfer
• At least 5 iterations of the Client application to be prototyped during the implementation phase and before pilot launch

Benefits

The FieldWorker team was able to launch a pilot on the 8th day of the project – 2 days under the set budget. “The industry is going this direction and with a tool like FieldWorker, we feel there’s little or no risk of being at the leading edge of mobile data collection in our industry,” said Arrol.

“I think it’s no question that this technology has made our workforce more productive, more connected and able to carry on the social aspects of their job as well as the business aspects,” added Bob Ridley, Director of Information Technology at Minto Group, “FieldWorker went above and beyond our expectations in terms of providing support from project inception through to go-live. We were pleasantly surprised that FieldWorker was able to deliver what they promised – a powerful solution in a very short period of time.”