About Town & Country
Town & Country Haus Lizenzgeber GmbH (commonly known as Town & Country) was founded in 1997 by Gabriele and Jürgen Dawo, based in Behringen (Thuringia). It is a franchise company that sells houses to builders through licensing partners. Every Town & Country builder benefits from comprehensive services, including the availability of land, house, and financing from a single source.
In 2004, new standards were set with the introduction of a house construction warranty included in the purchase price.
The solidly constructed, turnkey houses built by Town & Country impress with their price-performance ratio. Thanks to standardized modular construction, the more than 40 different types of houses can be built in several hundred variants and customized according to individual customer wishes.
In 2017, Town & Country focused on the digitalization of corporate processes. This included the introduction of a web portal for builders, a virtual reality house tour, and the option to view solid houses using augmented reality, for instance, on a prospective property.
Since its founding, Town & Country, along with its over 300 franchise partners worldwide, has built more than 37,000 houses.
Objective
Development of a digital sampling portal for improved consulting and sampling of a construction project.
Implementation
The digital sampling portal is being developed based on Intershop software. For this, 4FO hosts the necessary test, edit, and live systems for Town & Country at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Frankfurt to ensure fail-safe operation. This setup includes several application servers (ASE), a shared file system, Solr search engine, and a web adapter with an integrated Shibboleth module.
Result
The integrated "Single Sign-On" module, named Shibboleth, has been configured so that builders and license partners now have the ability to log into the sampling portal as well as other operated portals of Town & Country simultaneously.
For the sampling shop, TC-Net2 is the CRM system that queries the data (house type, construction project number, construction progress, etc.) of the construction project (for builders) or the construction projects of a specific license partner at every login. In TC-Net2, logins and passwords are also managed. However, there is no registration process like in a conventional online shop.
Through the sampling shop, builders can create a digital sampling list and discuss it with the license partners. The houses and products, along with their corresponding descriptions, are provided by Town & Country. Since each house type has a fixed contract price, no prices are displayed for the individually sampled standard products, but prices are shown for optional surcharge items.
In the sampling portal, builders have a specific sampling view and can browse through various categories, such as the "Roof Tiles" category, to select appropriate products. If the builder wants to see the product in reality, they can use the store locator to find the nearest dealer.
Through the so-called special request product, the builder can express special requests with a detailed description of the product, should it not be found in the various categories. Additionally, a builder can create multiple sampling lists concurrently.
The goal of the sampling shop is for the builder to sample the house as completely as possible (i.e., select products in as many categories as possible). To make it easier for the builder to keep track, 4FO has implemented a completeness check that uses different colors to visualize which categories have been fully sampled and which have not.
When the builder considers their sampling list to be complete, they can report the list to their assigned license partner as "Preliminary selection completed." This triggers an automatic message that is sent to the license partner. However, the license partner also has the ability to view the status of the list at any time. Once both parties accept the sampling list as finalized, a digital house purchase contract is entered into between the builder and the license partner.
Additionally, license partners in general can create their own sampling lists, for example, to demonstrate the functionality of the sampling portal to the builder.
Additionally, there is now a demo shop where a pre-constructed project by Town & Country can be viewed. However, this is only accessible to franchise partners.
