By David Rozansky
John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods, Inc.,
has built a large empire in a short 29 years that includes every aspect of
homebuilding. The leading builder of homes in the Southeast, John Wieland
Homes built more than 1,400 houses and town homes in 1998 alone. The
company’s primary market is Atlanta, but all told, the company has
developed 65 neighborhoods in Atlanta; Charleston, SC; Columbia, SC;
Charlotte, NC; Raleigh-Durham, NC; Jacksonville, FL; and Nashville, TN.John Wieland Homes’ numerous divisions provide virtually every service and material necessary for homebuilding, including the kitchen sink. The company has its own plumbing and lighting fixture outlet. One division specializes in interior and exterior design. Another division manufactures and installs custom cabinetry. Doors, windows and architectural millwork come from yet another division. The architectural group offers a portfolio of 150 homes and town homes that are highly customizable and creates dozens of new designs every year. John Wieland's empire even has its own landscaping service, and a land development division creates extensive neighborhood plans.
Capital equipment is also included in John Wieland Homes portfolio. The company has a grading subsidiary with grading equipment. It owns its own commercial-grade lumberyard, complete with roofing material. Even the dumpsters on John Wieland Homes' construction sites belong to John Wieland Homes.
And, the work does not stop at construction. John Wieland Homes also owns a real estate agency and a mortgage-lending service. About the only thing that John Wieland does not offer is a moving van.
It would be easy for a large, all-encompassing homebuilder to cut corners to keep costs down. Wieland’s philosophy, however, is exactly the opposite, and he has built a highly profitable business by paying attention to customers’ desires and providing premium-quality homes. High on most customers’ list is that their homes project individuality and personality. To meet this need, John Wieland Homes offers customization to a degree that is practically unheard of in the housing industry. Other large developers may offer as many as a dozen different window options for their plans, but John Wieland Homes offers more than 1,000 different window styles. Other developers may offer a dozen plans, with options for only minor variations. John Wieland offers a portfolio of 150 plans with options to make major changes, such as moving door frames, staircases, or entire sets of rooms.
Some
might think that all this work is overkill, but Jim Saporsky, the CADD
manager of John Wieland Homes' architectural group explains that their
CADD system has made the work manageable. It has also given John Wieland
Homes a significant edge over its competition. “Being able to offer this
degree of optimization to customers, while keeping the cost of the home
affordable is a powerful marketing tool for John Wieland Homes,” said
Saporsky.John Wieland Homes utilizes 37 seats of DataCAD® (from DATACAD LLC, Avon, CT), a professional 2D and 3D architectural CADD program. The company has created more than 2,600 parts and templates in DataCAD, including architectural drawings for all the different windows, doors, frame styles, roofs and fixtures that are offered. Saporsky makes the best use of the system by incorporating the software's layering capabilities and conversion capabilities. A plan drawing of a window or door is linked to the appropriate elevation drawing of the same part, so that the elevation and plan drawings are created simultaneously. The software is also used in site planning, and the final plans quickly boil down to "black line" floor plans that customers can peruse in print or online.
Once a customer chooses his or her options, the John Wieland Homes’ designers create a base plan that integrates those options into the plans. Many developers append changes to the original building plan, making them difficult to read and leaving them open to misinterpretation. “Giving the customer a new set of revised drawings isn’t difficult if you plan for change from the start,” noted Saporsky. To accomplish this task, John Wieland Homes’ design team maintains templates that are entire CADD layers, and each layer has a reference point so that the part automatically fits into place against the base layers once it is pulled up. Saporsky also noted that his company makes extensive use of DataCAD's Edit Sets feature, where the software applies layers that can create quick changes in plans for optional features.
"We
use the Edit Sets feature repeatedly with great success for drawing
in-plan options," Saporsky said. "Options are incorporated right into the
job-start plan. We can change the base plans very quickly, say from a
two-car garage to a three-car garage. The feature can help us change a
2-1/2 bath house to three baths or four baths, simply by pouring optional
framing layers into the layout. We have sometimes used up all the edit
sets available on houses and wished for more."Saporsky noted that his job is not only to keep the CADD library of parts and templates up-to-date, it also includes keeping the designers and drafters up-to-date on those same templates. He keeps 185-page manuals handy that show every single template "It is important that our people know about them all," he said.
The exceptionally flexible CADD system that Saporsky manages keeps the homebuilder light on its feet. John Wieland Homes is often faster than its competition without having to resort to assembly-line tactics. Saporsky has noted that having a system that can view a house plan from any angle is beneficial to speeding up design time while answering customer and contractor questions. Having an architecturally dedicated CADD software package was important because software that is intuitive to architects means he spends less than two weeks bringing trainees up to speed on the system.
"We can draw anything the homebuyer wants" Saporsky said. "We are a volume builder, but everything we do is custom work."
