About Client
Progress Residential is one of the largest providers of high-quality single-family rental homes in the USA. Managing 30,000 properties in 15 markets across the United States, they required a high quality product to cut down the overall time a property is in Make Ready phase prior to being placed back onto the market for leasing.
As their QA process per property was largely manual, Progress Residential was also in need of an automation framework that would enable their QA team to quickly validate each build and ensure that all the Make Ready auto-creation features were working on each.
MST (A Mastek Company) provided a Make Ready application in Salesforce to manage renovations and turns for each of Progress Residential’s properties, and an automation framework to dispense with the quantity of paperwork and emails generated per property.
The Challenge
Progress Residential manages different types of properties; for each property type, a “Make Ready” project should be automated. Prior, each Make Ready project was a lot of manual work with masses of paperwork and emails generated.
For example, scheduling jobs with external vendors required multiple emails. Make Ready Coordinators and Project Managers kept track of hundreds of emails just to coordinate work across various partner vendors.
QA efforts were labor intensive as they manually verified all the scenarios for every new build: these processes as well should be automated.
Progress Residential required a quality product to cut down the amount of time a property was in Make Ready mode, prior to being placed back on the market. Automating these various projects would not only save time but ensure each Make Ready project was done correctly.
The Solution
To find the best outcome for Progress Residential, they needed an outside-of-the-box solution that simplified their processes.
- Customized TaskRay, PM software, integrating our solution with it.
- UtilizingCalendarAnything, the client is able to visualize project tasks and assign vendors to each.
- Salesforce Communities enabled Progress Residential Managers and Supervisors to review the jobs performed by technicians and certify the property rent-ready.
- For the Progress Residential QA process, we created an automation framework that would allow the QA team to quickly validate each build and ensure that all the Make Ready auto-creation features were working on every single build. This framework was developed with Behavior Driven Development (BDD) methodology to aid non-technical team members to understand the software project better.
Technologies Used
- Automation framework
- Salesforce communities
- TaskRay
- CalendarAnything
- BDD methodology
Results
The results were evident in that the total amount of time a property spent in Make Ready was greatly reduced, meaning that it could be turned over for leasing much faster after closing or a resident moved out.
Due to a higher quality of testing with reduced manual effort, Progress Residential now has a functional automation framework in place that will save time, reduce expenses, and improve employee productivity. These features have the indirect benefit for improving external users’ experience. They also aided with the easy identification and debugging of issues that eventually helped to deliver the quality product for the business.