This year we are presenting at the CWG Bi Annual Conference in Vienna.  The topic is "Best Practices for Pricing using Variant Configuration".  This is an area that some customers do not fully understand, and can lead to problems on how to best manage VC pricing and set it up.

Home Building Solution - Custom Design Demo

We are developing a solution to enable a Home Building Company to work with custom plans from a client to be able to determine a bill of materials and therefore cost the house.

This would also be useful where a Home Building Company has a new design they want to cost.

Our solution provides an automated way of generating a bill of materials with minimal data input.  So instead of having to work with a list of 1000 components our solution requires the input of basic attributues and SAP does the rest. 

 Here is the Challenge

I was talking to a Home Building Company a couple of weeks ago.  They felt that perhaps  the SAP Home Building Solution could not really meet the requirement to handle a highly customised house.  I agree that the SAP Demo system for Home Building probably does not cater for this scenario.

Whatever software you use to support your home building business there are always areas that can cause problems.  Often these problems can occur when an adhoc change is required.

For example the customer likes the house plan... but can you just add a window here, delete one from there.  You can do it, but sometimes it can be a challenge to ensure the other components are also updated.  Add a window then less bricks, changes to lintels, studs etc etc.

The SAP Home Building Solution is part of the SAP FOR ENGINEERING, CONSTRUCTION & OPERATIONS.  This areas covers a wide range of business types from Ship Building to various types of construction industries.

In the Home Building area SAP lists a group of companies that have implemented the home building solution.

You may not know this but SAP has a Home Building Solution

I was recently involved in an SAP Project implementing SAP into a Home Building Company in Australia.  The SAP Home Building solution is not so much a solution, but a framework on how to approach configuring SAP to meet the needs of the Home Building Industry.

One of our goals in forming this business was to bring together different skills into one place and reapply them in other ways. We have quite different backgrounds and career paths, but a common theme is that training can always be better and integrated into businesses in a more complete way.