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1/9/2012 - Kova Solutions Milestones

On August, 8, 2004, Jouko Vakiparta, Rich Kashian and Dave Doherty gathered to talk about their futures. The meeting has become iconic in company lore, and the direct result of it was that they decided to start a business providing a new generation builder management software program. They believed they could create a program that was easy to implement and use, dynamic in helping the decision-making process, and facilitated clear communication among all the parties involved in the building process, including homebuyers, sales people, design center staff, production workers, and accounting personnel in one total solution.

There was reason for their optimism. By 2004, Vakiparta, Kashian and Doherty had amassed years of experience in the home building software management field and had seen on the front lines what worked for home builders and what they wanted. They had also tracked the changes in technology and knew that the new platforms were more robust and easier to use. Developing a software program for builders starting in 2003 gave them significant advantages over the legacy programs that dotted the landscape at that time.

Three people don’t arrive at a meeting in August of 2004 without a bit of history to urge them to that crux point.

Vakiparta, Kashian and Doherty worked with each other in the early 90s. Vakiparta was the chief developer of the Argos system, a division of the Finnish company, Vertex, which had ambitions to make a strong play in the U.S. housing market. He hired Kashian and Doherty to be application engineers for the Argos system. During that time, they had high success rates implementing systems with companies who, often, are still using them today.

They worked together during that period on quite a few projects—Vakiparta developing and Kashian and Doherty implementing. The result was that they learned a great deal from the leading production builders about how their companies operate, how options systems work, how homes are put together, and how the home builder process is implemented at its most sophisticated level.

In 1999, they went in different directions. Vakiparta stayed with Argos, which started eArgos in response to the demand for a strong web-based presence that was a result of the growth of the dotcom era. eArgos eventually morphed into i4Synergy.

Kashian started Simpad, which is now a leading Building Information Management tool for production home builders. The company started as an Argos consultant, working with big clients. In a few months, Kashian had three really good clients, and brought Dave Doherty to help with the workload.

The three crossed paths again through sharing a couple of significant clients—Oakwood Homes in Denver, and K.Hovnanian Homes in Red Bank, N.J.

Two significant experiences during this period helped define what Kova Solutions software would become. One was that because of the pressure of the dotcom era, i4Synergy was trying to roll out a software package far too quickly. At one point the company considered six months to be a critical time frame to create market presence and to become a viable competitor.  The compressed timeframe caused significant pressure and led to some "not so good" decisions and inconsistent software architecture. Secondly, the company secured builders as investors in the product. Consequently, the builder investors wanted the program designed to meet their processes, which didn’t necessarily match other companies' processes and led to very complex requirements. On a quick timeframe, software development can’t become something for everyone. So, within the crucible of a tight time frame and investor pressure to meet specific and unique demands, the project became bogged down and was taking too long. For Vakiparta, the lesson learned was that you can have too many beta clients. After the project stalled, Vakiparta took a position consulting with K.Hovnanian during the fall of 2003, working on a team with the goal of identifying the requirements for the future software program for K.Hovnanian Homes.

His family stayed in Finland, so he spent the evenings researching Microsoft.Net, studying to learn about how it could be used as platform for a home building management system. That knowledge combined with the Argos experience pushed him toward developing a code generation system that allows developers to easily and quickly create class-definition files for different data elements, such as  customers, and then automatically generate the entire source code.

The result is that developers can quickly create software packages with a uniform architecture and good quality. The development requires fewer resources (read: developers) and significantly reduces the number of what Vakiparta calls “stupid bugs” in the development process. In addition, the code generation tool makes even drastic software architecture changes manageable and allows the company to adopt new technologies quickly.

After the consulting agreement ended, Vakiparta returned to Finland and spent the summer of 2004 writing the code for the option configurator that became the heart of the Kova Solutions system. That progress eventually led to the founders coming together in August 2004 to discuss the future.

Even with the new program in place and a clear path delineated, none of the founders was interested in developing a business that would not get off the ground or grow so fast from different pressures that it lost its ability to successfully meet the customers' key requirements.

They agreed to several factors, which are unique with Kova:

1. Kova did not seek investor builders to help develop the software, which allowed them to pull the best of the building processes they had come to learn.
2. They took the time to work with a selection of builders and developed solutions for their problems.
3. The platform allowed the developers to change the architecture easily, so it can adapt to new technology more quickly and code can be renewed with reasonable effort.
4. The architecture was consistent across the platform so that new features can be developed more quickly.

 

Much of this became very pertinent when the home-building industry went through the huge upswing followed by the massive slump from 2003 to 2011. Builders' businesses changed dramatically during that time, and home buyers began asking for very different options and plans.

In August 2005, Kova started beta testing the program with a Florida homebuilder, offering the company the complete package without any fees. They wanted to figure out where the holes were, and choosing a smaller semi-custom builder would really put the option configurator through the ringer. The builder had a huge option program that required Kova to be nimble and aggressive. During one period, the builder gave Kova 10 options to implement and two weeks later presented them with a whole new and much larger option package.

Later that year, the company started with Oakwood Homes in Denver. The goal was to determine return on investment data for companies interested in implementing the Kova Solutions package. Kova has worked with Oakwood throughout its history, and a case study showing the ROI can be downloaded here.

 

Today, Kova provides builders with a robust system that allows a unified and integrated business process with consistent data control across the entire system. The prospects browsing the builder's web site are registered to the Kova database. From that point on all the information created during the sales and construction process follows the homebuyer to the customer service module.

And in 2010, Kova rolled out Kova Mobile, which provides access to the web-based package through mobile devices, putting the knowledge and power in the hands of the people making field decisions. The company was able to roll out this package quickly and efficiently primarily because the founders made decisions about software and business development based on their deep knowledge of the industry.