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When Northern Kentucky-based Drees Homes looked to cut costs during the housing recession, it reevaluated its use of laptops in the field.
Drees determined it could replace the costly devices – more than $2,000 per laptop – with tablets. The company rolled out 75 tablets to its field employees and tested them on construction sites in Jacksonville, Fla., Dallas and Cincinnati. Following its initial rollout, Drees Homes selected Verizon Wireless as its provider and deployed more than 100 tablets in the field.
Today, Drees field employees enjoy a paperless environment, relying on Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE network to share photos of construction sites, check weather in real-time, and scan and edit documents while on the site. In addition, Drees employees are armed with smartphones to stay connected.
“The majority of our employees are out in the field building houses but they need to be connected just like they were sitting in the office,” said Karen Arens, Drees Homes corporate office manager. “We feel like we have this covered in the best possible way for the employees to communicate effectively and be very productive in their job responsibilities.”
Ryan Roedersheimer, business account executive at Verizon, said Drees is one of the first to use tablets in the home construction industry. As Roedersheimer told The Cincinnati Enquirer, “We’ve gotten a lot of ideas from Drees on how we might be able to repurpose this technology with other vendors.”