Product development doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is pushed and pulled through a complicated web of suppliers and customers: those who want to help create the product and those who create the demand for the product.
In the case of home building, many ideas are pushed by material providers who have their own, unique R&D departments that are constantly striving to improve. At the same time, those suppliers are pushed by builders; builders that want faster, cheaper, better solutions.
In this video, Michael Mancini, vice president of purchasing, and Royal Erickson, national strategic sourcing director at Meritage Homes share how they leverage relationships with suppliers to lead Meritage in a never-been-done-before case study in innovation.
This project has been the platform for Meritage Homes to tap into the resources of manufacturers, Mancini explains. As a team they look at what’s next, what’s coming, and what will be in the future. Manufacturers are always working on the next best thing, and Mancini says that this project is giving them the platform to pull in products that may have been only in a custom environment.
As a first time experience for Meritage Homes, Erickson says, it’s very exciting to work with products with which Meritage has limited familiarity. The reNEWable Living Home is giving the company the opportunity to test things and do things that it has talked about doing in the past, but didn’t have the right platform.
The Meritage Homes team is prepared to share everything that it learns. “The more innovation that permeates into home building, the better off that innovation is in home building,” says Mancini.
Ultimately, the goal is to use all of these experiments to change the way people interact and live in a home. And, by sharing all the new ideas and concepts, they hope to get them produced at a higher scale.
There are two challenges to what this group is doing. One is keeping up with technology. It’s advancing so quickly that it’s hard to anticipate what will come next and how much better it may be than a current product. However, technology is impossible to ignore. Technology is going to be a big driver in all the products Meritage brings into the project’s design, Mancini says.
The second challenge is change.
“The hardest part of our industry is getting the folks that actually build the homes to change the way they build the homes because they are busy building homes the way they used to,” Mancini says.
With Meritage’s strategic collaborations and its pursuit of innovation, the ReNEWable Living Home project is sure to hit some home runs. Watch the progress of this home and how the innovation helps shape the future of housing at www.builderonline.com/renewable.
