Vol­u­met­ric Build­ing Com­pa­nies founder and CEO Vaugh­an Buck­ley char­ac­ter­izes his 12-year-old orga­ni­za­tion as a ​“con­struc­tion and man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny that’s embrac­ing technology.”

“‘Embrac­ing’” may be an under­state­ment. Philadel­phia-based Vol­u­met­ric leaves behind a small SAP Busi­ness One sys­tem and sev­er­al oth­er ERP sys­tems, instead build­ing out an enter­prise-wide RISE with SAP instal­la­tion to run its busi­ness. SAP S/4HANA, host­ed on AWS EC2 servers, is expect­ed to help Vol­u­met­ric — found­ed to build mod­u­lar, mul­ti-fam­i­ly hous­ing — bet­ter under­stand and man­age its volatile costs, mate­r­i­al avail­abil­i­ty, and oth­er sup­ply chain dynam­ics as it grows, diver­si­fies, and serves cus­tomers globally.

Volumetric’s first plant is set to cut ful­ly over this month, fol­low­ing four months of rapid design, plan­ning, and test­ing phras­es. The company’s CIO, Dave Elmer, said that plans call for a sequenced imple­men­ta­tion. A sec­ond plant is expect­ed to take eight weeks, fol­lowed by the next two sites and a glob­al roll­out in late fall.

“‘Sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, Scal­a­bil­i­ty, and Speed’”

This rel­a­tive­ly fast pace tack­les what Vol­u­met­ric lead­ers need and want from the sys­tem: ​“busi­ness process sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, scal­a­bil­i­ty, and speed,” Elmer said. 

Volumetric’s growth is in part organ­ic, as the demand for mid-mar­ket and low-income hous­ing, in cities of all sizes, con­tin­ues to out­pace sup­ply. A hor­i­zon­tal­ly and ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grat­ed busi­ness, the company’s 500 employ­ees pro­vide design, com­po­nent man­u­fac­tur­ing, and on-site con­struc­tion services.

Growth prospects inten­si­fied in 2021 as Vol­u­met­ric acquired Kater­ra Inc., includ­ing its plant in Tra­cy, CA, to spur West Coast expan­sion. In addi­tion, Vol­u­met­ric recent­ly announced a merg­er with Pol­com Group, which crafts fur­ni­ture and builds steel struc­tures for the hos­pi­tal­i­ty indus­try across mul­ti­ple con­ti­nents. Between the already exist­ing strong hous­ing mar­ket demand, the com­plet­ed acqui­si­tion, and the forth­com­ing final­ized merg­er, the indus­try places Volumetric’s busi­ness pipeline as mov­ing toward the $1B mark.

Indus­try 4.0 Considerations

Busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy dri­vers, and what arrived with the Kater­ra acqui­si­tion, made RISE with SAP and SAP S/4HANA top pri­or­i­ties for Elmer and his team.

“We acquired a fac­to­ry in Tra­cy that was ful­ly auto­mat­ed, and we basi­cal­ly need­ed to bolt all these things togeth­er and make them work on a glob­al scale. We want­ed to sim­pli­fy the finan­cial and man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es as we scale. And then add in the abil­i­ty and the automa­tion for Indus­try 4.0. That was our going[-]in posi­tion,” he explained.

The SAP S/4HANA adop­tion strat­e­gy shift­ed from the ini­tial brown­field plan to a green­field approach ​“because the way the fac­to­ry oper­at­ed was total­ly dif­fer­ent” than orig­i­nal­ly expect­ed, Elmer added. The fac­to­ry went from many auto­mat­ed com­po­nent lines to an auto­mat­ed mod­u­lar line that required dif­fer­ent SAP sys­tems and modules.

Hands-On Learn­ing

Vol­u­met­ric used agile meth­ods to achieve project mile­stones, in what Elmer described as suc­cess with a ​“plant-dri­ven and peo­ple accep­tance” phi­los­o­phy. With­out project or con­sult­ing part­ner assis­tance for any part of the ini­tia­tive, the project process kept stake­hold­ers and every­one else involved out of ​“con­fer­ence rooms” and involved in hands-on SAP learn­ing, focused on first-phase ​“small wins” fol­lowed by iter­a­tions, he said.

“I’m a huge believ­er in that [func­tion­al users] have to be on the sys­tem, to visu­al­ize what the sys­tem will look like,” Elmer explained. ​“We had peo­ple who had nev­er seen SAP before or who under­stood what to do. So, I had them do vir­tu­al projects over and over and over, peo­ple in job func­tions such as sup­ply chain, pro­duc­tion, ware­hous­ing finance. They’d com­plete the end-to-end process.”

Elmer also said that Vol­u­met­ric lever­aged the RISE with SAP best prac­tices port­fo­lio and has deployed 37 process­es thus far. ​“SAP [has] built 80,000 cus­tomers. They’ve already fig­ured out how to make a pur­chase order. We don’t need to do that, I think,” Elmer quipped.

Reflect­ing on the RISE with SAP ini­tia­tive so far, Elmer not­ed two key lessons, approach­es that close­ly aligned with Vol­u­met­ric key val­ues, includ­ing ​“Improve Every­day” and ​“Own Every­thing You Touch.”

“Embrace change and learn­ing — if you’re not learn­ing, you won’t embrace it, and if you won’t embrace it, you’ll nev­er learn,” he said. ​“And hit the basics. Don’t get caught in all the fan­cy things; hit the basic mile­stones all the way through with the core sys­tem, [and] then you can advance it into Indus­try 4.0.”