David Reid Homes is an iconic New Zealand brand with a proud history dating back to 1993. It is one of the largest building groups in New Zealand and has achieved numerous accolades for the quality of its workmanship, including winning more Registered Master Builder gold awards in recent years than any other national building group.
David Reid Homes’ 22 franchisees are much happier since head office introduced a new intranet system, says Jessie Macaw, David Reid Homes’ Marketing Manager. Like most organizations, David Reid Homes relied heavily on email as their primary way of communicating. Jessica continues, “Email is good if you just want one-on-one contact, but the minute you want to communicate with a group of people who all need different things, it’s easier to have a secure, central hub of information.
Macaw uses MyHub’s intranet solution primarily to share information with the building company’s franchisees and to notify them ofanything they need to know when they need to know it. It’s secure, it’s visual, and people can find exactly what they want, when they want it, she says. “We’re a franchise business, so it works really well to share information with different franchisees, but it would work equally well in any medium to larger size company where you’ve got lots of things going on and lots of people needing different information.” Macaw says all the company’s documents are stored and backed-up on the intranet and she can set different permission rights, invisible to users, allowing different people within the organisation different access rights to the material on the intranet. “The information a franchise owner needs to see compared with a salesperson is very different, but sometimes it overlaps. This saves a lot of time as you only need to load something once and then lots of people can see it, but only the people you want to see it. It lets you put up what you need to put up, how you want to put it up.” She continues, “It saves so much time. You can have quick links and messages on your homepage – so when our people log on, the first thing they see is the new thing that’s on there.
“We’ve had great feedback from the franchisees; they love it.”