How Villara Building Systems Digitized Construction Workflows

The construction industry is long overdue for a technology revolution. With so many moving parts, companies in the construction industry have long been dealing with manual, outdated processes that are extremely time-consuming, inefficient, and prone to human error.

Construction companies, like Villara Building Systems, have completely optimized their once outdated business processes by quickly digitizing their SAP workflows. What once involved arduous tasks and manual processes, is now efficient and automated.

Villara's Outdated Manual Processes

Villara Building Systems, formerly known as Beutler Sheet Metal, was founded in 1947 by Del Beutler. It specializes in service for HVAC and plumbing, new installations, retro installations, and solar systems for residential homes, multi-family homes, and commercial buildings.

By 2004, Villara had outgrown its legacy operations system of over 50 years. They had a great need to:

• Automate resource planning, production, and supply chain operations 
• Improve insight into project, labor and material costs

The construction industry was, and still is, far behind on integrating modernized technology into their outdated legacy systems.

Aware of the general industry need to modernize business systems, Villara made the switch to SAP in 2006. But that wasn’t enough. The SAP solution they used lacked automation and required manual entries, which resulted in human errors and inaccuracies in their database.

In one example, their team’s field time cards were completely manual and wasted time that employees could otherwise be using to continue to grow the business.

Additionally, human errors were a high factor in processing time cards, with some employees having to work through holidays in order to correct the errors. Work-life balance was also nonexistent during this period, and Villara needed a new solution that was more automated for their business and less stressful for their employees.

Digital Transformation with Low-Code

When first searching for a low-code solution that would solve all of the company’s problems with inefficiency, Villara outlined eight capabilities it required to be successful:

• Specialty in Mobile Enablement
• Ease of Development
• Highly Secure
• Scalable
• Affordable
• Offline Capabilities
• Tight integration to SAP
• And, just a great, all around company to partner with

After looking into several other SAP ERP solutions that were too expensive or lacked a truly modernized product, when Villara came across Pillir, they were able to fulfill all of these requirements—and more.

The Pillir Solution for Villara Building Systems

Low-code is a software development approach to coding that allows SAP ERP users to create and manage applications quickly with minimal manual coding required- automating the creation of web apps in a manner that makes their creation both quick and effective.

Pillir offers a low-code rapid application development platform called EdgeReady Cloud which allows construction companies to apply more value to their time and money with the world's most advanced and sophisticated offline-capabilities. EdgeReady Cloud provides legacy modernization and enables end users to process data and execute business rules in any device's offline mode, completely, for several days.

But how does this help a construction company such as Villara?

Click below to listen to their story:

There are also benefits that EdgeReady Cloud can offer to others in the construction industry:

• Offline Capability: high-volume offline data processing
• ERP Integration: native integration to systems like SAP, Oracle, SFDC
• Self-Managing: no infrastructure costs or people needed

After Villara implemented Pillir’s solutions into their workforce, they started to notice major changes to the way they operated and the effect it was having on their day-to-day. Their previous struggles with payroll and time cards became optimized and automated. Their workforce was completely transformed through:

• Modernization: automated time-entry process for employees and ease of upload for payroll
• Integrated and Cost-Effective End-to-End Solutions: end-to-end mobile solution fully integrated with SAP—enabling greater visibility
• Streamlined Core System and Process: minimum use of ABAP code, lowers TCO of SAP

With SAP integrated payroll processes, what once took Villara three days now only takes 20 minutes. The digital transformation of their original, paper-based processes to a low-code solution has completely transformed the way Villara operates and has saved them time, money and effort.

The Value of Optimizing

With the custom, low-code rapid application development solution offered by Pillir, Villara was able to maximize their work processes, save time and energy and optimize essential operations. Processes that were once manual and tedious have transformed into a smooth, automated solution that enables Villara to maintain employee health and well-being and also continue to make technological strides in their industry. Legacy modernization is achieved.

If you’re interested in learning more about companies like Villara Building Systems, such as Nabors, Dole Packaged Foods, Mobile Mini or other global industry leaders who have chosen Pillir to modernize their ERP system, reach out to our team – we’d be happy to share their stories with you and help define your use case.