Digital Sampling Portal for Town & Country
About Town & Country
The Town & Country Haus Lizenzgeber GmbH (short: Town & Country) was founded in 1997 by Gabriele and Jürgen Dawo with headquarters in Behringen (Thuringia). It is a franchise enterprise, which sells houses to clients by means of license partners. Every Town & Country client benefits from extensive services. For example, land, house and financing are available from a single source.
With the introduction of the house building protection letter received in the purchase price new yardsticks were set in 2004.
The houses built by Town & Country in solid construction, ready for occupancy, convince with their price-performance ratio. The more than 40 different house types can be built in several hundred variants thanks to the standardized modular construction method and designed according to individual customer wishes.
In 2017, Town & Country focused on the digitization of business processes. Thus, in addition to a web portal for builders, a virtual reality house inspection was introduced as well as the option of viewing solid houses using augmented reality on, for example, the future plot of land.
Since its foundation, Town & Country has built more than 37,000 houses with its more than 300 franchise partners worldwide.
Aim
Development of a digital sampling portal for better consultation and sampling of a construction project.
Implementation
The digital sampling portal is being developed on the basis of Intershop software. For this purpose, 4FO hosts the test, edit, and live systems necessary for fail-safe operation at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Frankfurt for Town & Country, including several application servers (ASE), shared file system, Solr search engine, and a web adapter with integrated Shibboleth module.
Result
The integrated “Single Sign-On” module called Shibboleth was configured accordingly, so that building owners and license partners now have the possibility to log in to the sampling portal as well as other operated portals of Town & Country at the same time.
For the sampling store the TC-Net2 is the CRM system, which asks for the data (house type, building code number, construction progress, etc.) of the building project (for builders) or the building projects of a special license partner with each login. In TC-Net2 the logins and passwords are also managed. However, there is no registration as in a conventional online store.
By means of the sampling store clients can create a digital sampling list and discuss it with the license partners. The houses and products as well as the corresponding description texts are provided by Town & Country. Since each type of house has a fixed contract price, no prices are displayed for the individual sampled standard products, but for optional extra charge items.
Clients have a specific sampling view in the sampling portal and can click through different categories, e.g. “roof tiles”, and select appropriate products. If the client wants to see the product in reality, he can use the store locator to find the nearest retailer.
If the product cannot be found in the various categories, the client can express special wishes by means of a detailed description of the product with the so-called special request product. It is also possible for a building owner to create several sample lists in parallel.
The aim of the sampling store is that the client samples the house as fully as possible (i.e. selects products in as many categories as possible). In order to make it easier for the client to keep track of the house, the 4FO AG has integrated a completeness check, which uses different colors to visualize which categories are already sampled and which are not.
If the client regards his sampling list as completed, he can report the list to his assigned license partner as ‘preselection completed’. An automatic message is generated and sent to the license partner. However, the license partner in general has the possibility to view the status of the list at any time. As soon as both parties accept the sample list as finalized, a digital house purchase contract is entered into between the owner and the license partner.
In addition, license partners can generally create their own sample lists in order, for example, to bring the client closer to the functionality of the sample portal.
Independent of this, there is now also a demo store where a prefabricated building project can be viewed by Town & Country. However, this is only accessible to franchise partners.
