My name is Cal Zant and I currently manage the IT team for Betenbough Companies, a production home builder in West Texas.  I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Texas Tech College of Engineering, and have been working as a .NET developer since the original 1.0 release.  It seems the construction industry usually stays pretty far behind the technology curve, and there aren't a lot of cutting-edge solutions out there for home builders ... at least none that are clean and stable.  So I am constantly trying to find ways to leverage technology, which provides a significant competitive advantage in our field.

Our company holds a fundamental strategy of constantly evaluating our processes and evolving to meet constantly changing market demands and become more efficient, which has led us to become a world-class home builder (included in the "Professional Builder Giant 400" builders in the world).  And although we always try to buy existing software solutions when we can (e.g. Dynamics GP 10.0 for accounting/purchasing, Exchange 2007 for office communications), some of our processes are quite unique to our company.  So we created our own enterprise application that not only links all of our different software solutions together, but also contains our own custom functionality for those areas that are unique to us.

This enterprise application is a custom ASP.NET 3.5 web application written in C#, with a SQL Server 2005 backend, and leverages several other technologies like ASP.NET AJAX, WCF Web Services, SQL Reporting Services, and .netTiers.  The areas of our business that are unique to us are the relationship and experience associated with our homebuyers, as well as some fundamental differences in our construction process.  So almost everything that has to do with these areas is handled in our web application including:

• Home purchase agreements and associated legal documents
• Information about homebuyers and all of our interactions with them
• Community, floor plan, and option relationships and pricing
• Manage what purchase orders should be generated for a particular home
• Manage work order information after the sale of the home
• View reports created in a variety of environments in a central location

We also have a mobile version of the application, which completely automates our production scheduling and allows employees in the field to stay connected by:

• Keeping track of the current status of homes
• Completing customized checklists for each construction task on all home
• Approving payment for labor or materials in the accounting system
• Logging any costs variances that we weren't anticipating to evaluate and use to update our purchasing or improve our various aspects in our construction process
• Communicate using comments and photos through custom forums for each home
• Automatically trigger notifications to our trade partners at various milestones in the contruction of a particular home

One thing I love about my job is being able to continually learn by keeping up with the latest technology.  It always keeps it fresh and exciting.  Plus I don’t know anything more fulfilling than digging into a complex, real-world problem and solving it with a clean, elegant software solution.  At Betenbough Companies, the majority of my time is spent architecting software solutions, researching and making decisions related to company technology, leading the IT team in implementing our technology strategies, and I still find myself coding in Visual Studio a considerable amount, and designing database structures or stored procedures in SQL Server.

I graduated from the Texas Tech College of Engineering with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in 2005.  From 2003-2006, I worked for Smooth Fusion, a Microsoft gold partner, as a software developer working on database-driven web applications.  By the end of that term I was working as lead developer on some some pretty high-profile Microsoft sites like CodeZone.com.  In 2006, I had a major role in revising a popular Computer Science textbook used in college and high school classrooms entitled Visual Basic 2005 BASICS (although I have to admit, I prefer C#).

It seems I have a lot of hobbies, including hunting, guitar, gardening, photography, and researching family history.  My best friend is my amazing wife, who somehow puts up with all of it, and tries to keep me from taking myself too seriously.