E-forms for home buyers

Based in Columbus, Ohio, M/I Schottenstein Homes builds 4,500 homes each year in various U.S. locations, from Indiana to Florida. Customers who visit its regional design centers choose from among thousands of exterior and interior options. Currently running in one of those centers — and scheduled for wider deployment — is an application built using Microsoft InfoPath, which replaces the paper forms that are used to gather information from customers and relay it to home builders in the field.

The InfoPath application runs on wirelessly connected laptops and Tablet PCs that design coordinators can carry with them as they tour the showroom with customers. A new instance of a form is dynamically populated with customer-specific data — including the location and details of the home buyer’s lot — that previously had to be copied by hand. The form also embodies complete knowledge of the available-options inventory, which, according to M/I Homes’ Vice President of Information Systems Ron Frisson, dramatically simplifies training. “There are literally thousands of choices that the design coordinators had to learn and know,” he says, “but this eliminates all the guesswork.”

The form adapts dynamically to selections, so that when a customer elects to upgrade from a standard to a Corian countertop, the drop-down lists automatically adjusts to the available colors. When a selection creates a new set of choices, the form grows to accommodate them, Frisson notes. The completed form feeds a sales application that produces the printed document signed by the customer and used by the builder. Re-creating the exact look and feel of the pre-existing paper wasn’t a requirement, which makes InfoPath a good fit for this solution.

One InfoPath capability that wasn’t demanded by M/I Homes’ wirelessly connected system is the ability to edit forms while offline. So in this case, a conventional Web-style intranet application would have been an alternate way to solve the problem. It’s a bonus that salespeople can edit forms while offline, at home or elsewhere. For a great many other forms applications, such offline use is a major requirement.