Pillar To Post

About Pillar To Post

Founded in 1994, Pillar To Post is the largest home inspection company in North America. Pillar To Post is one of the franchise networks operated by FirstService Corporation, a Canadian company, specializing in residential property services. FirstService is listed on NASDAQ and the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Challenge

Pillar To Post’s vision was to empower its franchisees with the ability to create comprehensive, same-day home inspection reports, while simultaneously offering management a holistic view of all inspection and sales data. In an effort to realize this vision, Pillar To Post made a considerable investment in Salesforce, which would serve as their core operational platform.

Working with an implementation partner, Pillar To Post started to build out their Salesforce ecosystem, as well as a custom iOS application called One Point – an iPad app designed for home inspectors to log and create inspection reports. Although the application did meet the general business requirements, technical debt due to poor development practices led to a negative user experience. As a result, franchisees were reluctant to adopt the application and Pillar To Post’s vision remained unattained.

Solution

AppCentrica was engaged to take over support for the solution to help Pillar To Post move forward with new functional and technical requirements.

In a matter of weeks, the AppCentrica team developed a functional understanding of the platform as well as the technical shortcomings related to the current solution. With the desired end state in mind, the AppCentrica team worked to optimize the One Point application and its connected Salesforce infrastructure as well as developing significant feature enhancements. As well, the team worked to improve existing integrations with DocuSign and FPN (payment processing) and built out new integrations for DocuSketch (to create walking tours and — floor plans) and WebPunch (an external survey platform).

After integrating the required third-party tooling, AppCentrica built out a series of comprehensive reports and dashboards to give Pillar-To-Post’s management team the visibility they required.

Outcomes

AppCentrica’s unique blend of custom application development, Salesforce expertise and integration experience enabled Pillar-To-Post to realize their vision of creating a full-service home inspection experience.

Franchisees and their home inspectors can now complete state-of-the-art inspections with ease entirely using the One Point application. The instability and problems associated to the initial builds have all been remedied and user adoption is substantially higher. Home inspections completed using One Point have gone up as much as 500% and system performance has greatly improved.

“Our company, Pillar-To-Post Inc., had made a significant investment in Salesforce and worked with a partner to implement it as a base for our network of franchisee home inspectors with the intention of providing them with a custom inspection app for iPads. I was brought on board as VP of IT with a mandate to finish the deployment initially started by another team. I reached out to AppCentrica since I had heard great things about their deep domain expertise not only in Salesforce but also in custom application development with Apple apps, enterprise architecture and data management. Its been a great journey and we have successfully rolled out new versions of the app to our franchisees over the past year. My experience with AppCentrica has been outstanding and I cannot recommend them highly enough.”

Guy Dewar, Vice President Information Technology, Pillar-To-Post

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