Lennar Redefines Scalability with Profit Concepts International

Lennar Corporation (NYSE: LEN), founded in 1954, is headquartered in Miami, Florida and is one of the nation’s leading builders of quality homes for all generations, building affordable, move-up and retirement homes. Lennar Family of Builders currently consist of twenty of the most respected homebuilding name brands in the country, including: Lennar Homes, U.S. Home, Greystone Homes, Village Builders, Renaissance Homes, Winncrest Homes, Lundgren Brothers, Orrin Thompson Homes, Rutenberg Homes, NuHome, Patriot Homes, Barry Andrews Homes, Cambridge Homes, The Genesee Company, Concord Homes, and Laureate Homes. To support an ever-growing customer base, Lennar Homes must constantly evaluate, upgrade and improve its world-class service and delivery platform, taking advantage of the most-promising and effective technology advances.

The Situation

In 1990 Pacific Greystone/Greystone Homes (later acquired by Lennar) was a startup home builder funded by a prominent Wall Street financial institution. Considering the rapidly declining real estate conditions at the time, Pacific Greystone’s was tasked with establishing a platform for rapid growth utilizing an aggressive merger and acquisition approach.

Pacific Greystone formed an internal solution selection and acquisition team and engaged Profit Concepts International to assist with the selection of an ERP software platform. As a start-up company (at the time) Pacific Greystone needed a solution that included a comprehensive set of policies and procedures in addition to a scalable ERP system to facilitate growth.

Solution

After a swift but thorough software evaluation and selection process, Pacific Greystone selected JD Edwards World ERP solution over several competitors, including McCosker, Timberline and others.

Now that Pacific Greystone had selected its ERP solution, a quick and effective implementation was needed to accommodate the anticipated growth. Profit Concepts international set out to perform the implementation.

Profit Concepts International’s experienced consultants and industry expertise led to a successful implementation. Within four months Pacific Greystone, which included four geographic divisions, was up and running on their new ERP system.

Before the implementation team could catch its breath, Pacific Greystone announced the acquisition of A-M Homes, a significantly larger home builder. A new combined team was assembled again, this time with an objective of absorbing a new entity with all of its historical transactions. Profit Concepts International was retained to help lead the absorption and data conversion efforts. The process was challenging but successful to the core.

Acquisition of A-M Homes was just the first of many done by Pacific Greystone until 1997 when they were acquired by Lennar Corporation. By this time Pacific Greystone’s annual revenues were $750 million, while Lennar was generating in excess of $1 billion in annual revenue. Lennar was so impressed by the Pacific Greystone’s systems that they decided to roll-out the same solution company wide. Based on the previous successful implementation and delivery of policies and procedures that met business needs, Profit Concepts International was again retained to help manage and lead the rollout and data conversion efforts.

In 2000 Lennar made a strategic acquisition of U.S. Home Corporation. With this merger, Lennar doubled in size, significantly increased its presence in the retirement home sector and diversified its position geographically across the country. Profit Concepts International managed and led the systems integration and data conversion efforts.

Today, more than fifteen years since establishing the relationship, Lennar Corporation continues to leverage Profit Concepts International for nearly all of their strategic and tactical IT challenges.

Benefits/ROI

Lennar Corporation has been a successful user of JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne software for more then 15 years. The greatest measurable improvements attained during the implementation were and continue to be:

1. Standardized operational, financial systems and procedures
2. Consolidated financial reporting
3. Improved month-end close
4. Improved controls

In conclusion, Bruce Gross, vice president and CFO, Lennar Corporation said:

“Profit Concepts provided a dedicated, experienced team of professionals to assist Pacific Greystone Corporation in designing, selecting and implementing our company’s management information systems. Profit Concepts’ team was engaged at the start up of our company with a mission to provide a complete systems solution in creating a large public national home builder."

"The systems implemented accommodated our company’s growth as we exceeded $400 million in revenues in 1996 and completed an initial public offering. It’s evident the systems implemented not only supported our rapid growth, but helped facilitate our expansion. The Profit Concepts consultants are knowledgeable not only with the JD Edwards software, but more importantly with understanding what drives our business."

In 1997 Pacific Greystone Corporation merged with Lennar Corporation. Lennar was impressed with the systems at Greystone and elected to implement those systems company-wide at Lennar. Profit Concepts was selected to lead the process of converting Lennar to the JD Edwards system. Lennar increased its revenues from $1.7 billion in 1997 to a projected $10 billion plus in 2004. As we review this period of aggressive growth for our company we realize that these systems helped facilitate a very aggressive growth program and Profit Concepts continues to be the organization we consult with in determining our strategic direction in information systems.

Environment

1. JD Edwards World ERP, version A7.3 running on an IBM I-series; approximately 900 users worldwide.
2. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP, version 8.10 running on IBM I-series, approximately 30 users in Stockton, California.