Industry Manifesto

The Builderchain business strategy can be confusing since the business model encapsulates the entire construction industry, with its multitude of Stakeholder Types, versus a simple “company-only” model. The great need for cross-organizational workflows and accounting transactions is something that provides unique challenges, but also a significant opportunity for the disruption of the construction industry via dramatic productivity gains.

Although there have been some limited technological gains realized with legacy systems by bolting on trade portals, these “company silo” approaches did nothing to aggregate the trade experience. This approach required the same trade to use many trade portals, basically a different one for each customer. Likewise, the estimating and bidding process suffers from the same systemic limitations.

Builderchain is here to create a collaboration environment for industry stakeholders, coupled with a comprehensively-standardized, industry-specific, and highly efficient digital marketplace. 

Builderchain is Data-Centric, not Application-Centric

The Information Architecture of both large and small organizations is a mess. Until we recognize and take action on the core problem, the situation will continue to deteriorate. 

Our partners and associates have uncovered a root cause of the messy state of Information Architecture in large institutions today. It is the prevailing application-centric mindset that gives applications priority over data. The remedy is to flip this on its head. Data is the center of the universe; applications are ephemeral.

These are the key principles of the data centric manifesto:

1. Data is a key asset of any organization.
2. Data is self-describing and does not rely on an application for interpretation and meaning.
3. Data is expressed in open, non-proprietary formats.
4. Access to and security of the data is a responsibility of the data layer, and not managed by applications.
5. Applications are allowed to visit the data, perform their magic and express the results of their process back into the data layer for all to share.

Data-centric is a major departure from the current application-centric approach to systems development and management. Migration to the data-centric approach will not happen by itself. It needs champions.  

Builderchain is one of those champions.

Builderchain can deliver continuous and ongoing industry productivity gains by providing “stakeholder specific” collaboration websites where stakeholders can keep up on industry news, but specifically targeted for that stakeholder group, a learning center where free training is provided, along with and specific merchant-based training that may be relevant. But most importantly, it will for this stakeholder collaboration that will drive the efficiencies of the participants of the marketplace. That collaboration will include marketplace “standardized coding protocols”, “standardized marketplace workflow processes”, and standardized “assembly and component” configurations used by stakeholders to completely automate the estimating and bidding process. Even issues such as how standardized and automated accounting transactions should be treated. Each Stakeholder “Community” portal has seamless, single-sign access to the commercialized Builderchain.io digital marketplace.

Builderchain can deliver continuous and ongoing industry productivity gains by providing a business platform that is fully integrated across all Stakeholders and Merchants. A business platform that workflow processes and accounting transactions flow seamlessly and transparently that allow the very highest level of efficiency gains. Builderchain.io customers are the merchants that participate in the digital marketplace. And since merchants provide turnkey back-office services, not software, success and adoption rate is significantly enhanced. 

Vision

The Builderchain vision has been a consistent one. It started as a comprehensive “business” solution and platform for all stakeholders in construction industry, and that stands today. That vision incorporates the fact that today represents a unique “inflection point” in time, when all businesses, and not just contractors, will be transitioning to the new “SaaS” model for operating and managing their businesses, leaving their old on-premise, legacy systems behind.

A set of Stakeholder Types that make up a Construction Industry Marketplace

What do we mean by an “industry solution”? An industry solution is a next-generation, WEB 3.0 “business platform” that includes not only a digital marketplace for the industry, but also seamlessly facilitates industry-specific, simultaneous dual party accounting transactions (think synchronous distributed ledger). But most importantly, the platform treats all stakeholder types in the industry (the contractor, the construction trade, the lender, the land developer, and strategically the manufacturer, etc.) as “equal citizens”, whose interaction with the platform is uniquely tailored specifically to their stakeholder needs. 

This is achieved in part by each Stakeholder Type having their own specific schema set; their own, branded, collaborative business portal, while still maintaining full and seamless integration with the entire industry-wide, multiple Stakeholder Type marketplace platform. 

Unlike all previous B2B systems, where the partner or trade was always using someone else’s system in a subordinate role, and not their own; a new industry solution would optimize a unified platform for every stakeholder type in a non-compromised way, while still maintaining full and seamless integration amongst all stakeholders.  

There are separate, branded, and curated portals uniquely designed and maintained for each Stakeholder Type, which you see listed here.

Industry Roles

• Back Office Merchant
• Code Enforcement/Government
• Construction Trade
• Designer
• Developer
• Engineer
• Franchise Owner
• General Contractor
• Home Builder
• Home Buyer
• Insurer
• Investor
• Issuer/Borrower
• Lender
• Manufacturer
• Project Owner
• Property Management
• Real Estate Broker
• Trade Association

A Platform of Merchant Services…

My vision is not about selling software but truly providing a platform that facilitates the delivery of everything as a turnkey service. And that service includes backoffice staff delivering services to any of the stakeholders participating on our industry platform. These services will be provided by either fully antomonous third-party “merchants” operating directly on the platform, such as we have created with BuildFi, or other Service Offerings created completely independent of Builderchain.  Here are some examples of various, specialized "merchant services" business models that could operate, and uniquely benefit, on the Builderchain platform:

Merchant Roles

• Instant Video Concierge - LiveOps Call Center Services
• BuildFi - Construction Financing Services
• BuildFi - Marketplace Lending Services
• EasiLoan  -Mortgage Financing Services
• BuilderPAY - Contractor Instant-Payment Services
• Revit - Product Design & BIM 360 Docs API Integration
• Builder Marketing - Dynamics 365 for Marketing
• Industry-Specific Market/Product Data Analysis Services
• Industry-Specific CRM Services
• Industry-Specific Product/Project Configuration Services
• Industry-Specific Contract Administrative Services
• Industry-Specific PreConstruction Administrative Services
• CrowdSourced & Aggregated Material Purchasing Services
• CrowdSourced & Aggregated  Construction Trade Acquisition Services
• Building Code Jurisdiction-Specific Estimating Services
• Remote Video Auditing & Analysis Services for Job Sites, Models,etc.
• Real-Time Video Enhanced Command Post Scheduling Services
• HR Construct-Industry-Specific Payroll & Human Resource Services
• Builder Accounting-Industry-Specific Accounting Services
• CloseEasy - Industry-Specific Legal Services
• Post-Closing Internet of Things Maintenance Services
• Builder Analytics Performance & Financial Analysis Services & Dashboards
• Builder Franchising

The providing of that seamless integration must be efficient, affordable, and it must be achievable. And by achievable, that goal can be realized with the ease and efficiency of working with a single database, a single development environment, and one set of cross-organizational workflow tools, that in our industry-wide scenario will work across company and stakeholder boundaries. By organizing an entire marketplace on a scalable platform such as Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft Power Platform, even the demands of industry-wide platform would only then mirror some of Microsoft’s largest corporate customers. 

But it’s more than sharing a common data source or the unique opportunities that are facilitated by having common workflows and collaborative environment. It’s also about all the stakeholders conducting business on one “common” multi-company accounting transaction engine, a transaction engine that is fully supported (and developed) by a long standing, industrial strength accounting software provider. 

In our case, that’s the Gravity Software accounting app that is built from the ground up as a native Microsoft Power Platform application. And since Gravity Software accounting app supports true data-model driven multi-company, we will provide full accounting functionality to both sides of a transaction, seamlessly and fully automated.