US company harnesses variety of software and hardware to help deliver more trailers to customers
Toby Ingleton |
Homegrown Trailers – a provider of artisan, sustainable travel trailers for sale and rent based in Kirkland, Washington State, US – has boosted its operations and productivity after adopting a number of Microsoft software and hardware technologies.
Established four years ago, the company has enjoyed rapid growth. However, for much of that time, Homegrown Trailers was using disparate systems, devices and technologies. Co-founder and CEO Corey Weathers started to feel productivity levels were being negatively impacted.
“With a fast-growing small business and a goal to produce a couple hundred trailers a year in the not too distant future, we quickly understood that technology is critical to our success and we needed a change,” he said. “We needed a more productive, secure and robust set of software and hardware technology that could keep up with our operational and production demands.”
To enhance its operations and digitally transform each employee’s personal work experience and collaboration efforts, Homegrown Trailers turned to Microsoft and SADA Systems, a Microsoft National Solutions Provider.
“SADA Systems led us through a series of discovery sessions to discuss our business processes and how Microsoft technology can improve our day-to-day operations,” Weathers explained. “The SADA team then completed our migration and deployment, and provided training services to ensure we optimised the vast features of the Microsoft cloud solutions.”
The company adopted a set of Microsoft software and hardware technologies, including Windows 10, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Windows devices.
“We appreciate the operating speed and how intuitively everything works together in Windows 10, especially the ease of collaboration and communication that comes with using its suite of tools,” said Weathers. “Windows Ink has been a unique addition that allows me to notate documents and engineering plans very quickly on my Surface Pro 4 when working with the production team. I can then send immediate plan updates to our engineers, designers, regulators and other stakeholders.”
Homegrown Trailers’ communication and collaboration has been enhanced thanks to tools such as SharePoint, Microsoft Planner, Skype for Business and Microsoft Outlook.
“I’ve also noticed a huge difference in ease of access to materials we are all working on,” said Weathers. “We can now easily post documents in SharePoint and work collaboratively without the hassle of clogging our email inboxes with large attachments, dealing with the headache of version control or wasting valuable time converting files back and forth.”
The company is now in the process of launching Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. This will help streamline interactions with customers, and enable smoother transitions from Homegrown Trailers’ sales team to the production team.
Weathers added: “With all of these tools at our fingertips, we can now avoid redundancies in our work and no longer have to battle technology inefficiencies so we can focus on building trailers and getting them to our passionate customers.”