When HistoryMaker Homes Chief Digital Officer Ty Brewer stepped into his role, he faced a challenge that would feel familiar to many of his peers: an ambitious, growing homebuilder was doing everything it could to remain responsive, agile, and scalable—but its systems, tools, and operational data weren’t working together to support that mission.

If there is a problem, we’re able to diagnose and develop a fix - sometimes in a matter of minutes. With our old system, it could take a week before we could figure out even where the problem was originating,” Brewer says, summarizing the inflection point his team has reached in an ongoing transformation with Constellation HomeBuilder Systems as its platform partner. “There's a lot of energy on the team around things we can do today that we couldn't do in the past. They're excited about the opportunity to use a system that finally allows them to do the things they wanted to do.”

It didn’t start that way. Like many builders that expanded quickly across regions and cycles, HistoryMaker’s internal functions had matured unevenly. Teams were committed, processes were sound, but systems lagged behind. Brewer joined to lead a transformation — but one that would prioritize people and culture, not just software adoption.

Implementing an ERP is always hard,” Brewer says. “Even if you have the best intentions, the best talent, the best ability, and the best market, you can still run into things that buzzsaw the project, because ERPs are just plain hard to do. Never underestimate how challenging an ERP is from the people, the processes, the culture, the technology. It is the hardest thing there is to do.”

From Silos to Shared Truth

Starting the moment he joined HistoryMaker in 2019, Brewer’s mandate was deceptively simple: "land the plane" on an ERP implementation that had faltered. What he inherited, however, was a tangled system—one where immature business processes had been overly integrated into the ERP itself, making change nearly impossible.

The goal was not to chase the shiniest tech or bolt on new tools, but to build a core foundation where every department could see the same data, speak the same language, and act with aligned purpose.

The shift didn’t happen overnight.

The only thing worse than a process that's not automated is a bad process that's fully automated," Brewer recalls. "We had a lot of immature processes that were maybe not even a good fit for the business, but they created and implemented the ERP to tightly enforce these business processes."

From day one, Brewer’s objective was to decouple inflexible processes from the technology meant to support them. As he dug in, it became clear the software wasn't enabling the business to evolve—it was enforcing outdated decisions.

Someone would say, 'we need the system to do that,' and I would ask, 'then why did we configure it so that it can't be done?'" Brewer said. The answer often came back: "We thought we'd never change our mind."

This realization—that business strategy and systems need to be agile together—set Brewer on a path to rewire HistoryMaker’s operational foundation. His vision was about more than just new technology; it was about selecting the right kind of technology partner.

There are different types of software companies," Brewer explained. "True software developers, holding companies that just extract revenue, and customer-centric firms striving for intimacy."

With Constellation, he saw a partner willing to invest and adapt—not just maintain.

At Constellation’s Build Smarter conference, Brewer was introduced to NEWSTAR™ and the then-emerging NX™ platform. What he saw impressed him—not because NX was ready to launch at the time, but because Constellation demonstrated a roadmap toward innovation and openness. Brewer asked Constellation and another new technology software player to commit to working together with him before he signed with either.

"They both said yes, and they’ve demonstrated that commitment. That’s been a real pleasant surprise. Our teams now operate with shared truth, not siloed assumptions,” Brewer says. “We’ve aligned our systems to reflect how we actually build homes.”

Constellation’s open-architecture approach aligned with Brewer’s vision for a connected digital ecosystem. The transformation wasn’t just about ERP. HistoryMaker rolled out NEWSTAR in phases, linked it to Salesforce via Constellation’s SalesXpress, integrated BuilderMetrix with Power BI for real-time insights, stood up a new CAD system that syncs design with production, and created a unified data warehouse dubbed "Grand Central."

The result is real-time visibility, from sales to construction, across both legacy and new systems.

In the past, we wouldn’t have been able to pivot as quickly as we have now," Brewer said. "That’s exactly what I wanted to enable—the ability to rapidly pivot as the business makes changes, for the software to be an enabler rather than a limiter."

Over 50% of HistoryMaker’s communities now operate on the new platform. The feedback from the field has been unanimous:

We’re receiving the benefits that were promised," Brewer says.

That’s the essence of moving from silos to shared truth—not just syncing data, but syncing purpose, agility, and performance across the enterprise.

A Mindset Shift—And Muscle Memory

Perhaps the most important element of the digital shift wasn’t technology at all. It was the ability for people at every level — back office, field teams, executives — to move from reactive fire-fighting to proactive decision-making.

The value of technology is, and always has been, that you should be able to demonstrate a positive return on the investment, and that return can come in the shape of improved processes,” says Brewer. “It can be allowing you to do something that you previously couldn't do. And I think that taking that attitude, if we have this technology or solution in place, what could we do?”

Cross-functional visibility means that decisions once made in silos—like estimating, scheduling, or job cost approvals—now happen in concert. That reduces friction, compresses cycle time, and strengthens accountability.

Brewer is quick to emphasize that this isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about people.

“This is how we make good people even better.”

Engineering for the Real World

One lesson Brewer underscores is that technology should mirror how builders actually build homes — not the other way around.

We've been really happy with the level of expertise Constellation has on building integrations with our systems, such as our data warehouse, reporting system, as well as other third-party applications in the front end of our processes,” he says.

That means digital tools must support real-world use cases: trade partner coordination, option selections, inspection timing, and milestone accuracy.

Too often, builders face a trade-off: adopt a tech platform that looks great in a demo, but breaks down when mapped to a builder’s real process.

The way that the system is built either makes it easy or difficult to get to the data the people in purchasing to understand exactly what dollars go where and it happens to be,” Brewer emphasizes. “With NEWSTAR, once our analysts and once our purchasing agents saw the way the data was organized, they had insights that were literally there the entire time in the old system, we just couldn't get to them.”

The payoff? Not just fewer errors or reduced costs—though those are material—but also higher confidence among team members at every step of the build process.

We took our learnings along the way. And what that did was it gave us confidence to go faster when we thought there was an opportunity to go faster. That helped us avoid building things that no one was going to use or value,” Brewer says.

Operating with Intention and Integrity

HistoryMaker’s transformation underscores a key truth about digital strategy: tools don’t create culture—but they can amplify it. The more aligned, secure, and transparent your systems are, the more empowered your people become.

For Brewer and his team, that means modernization that respects the past, leverages institutional knowledge, and brings clarity to complexity.

The success to date has been because the technology solution was built hand in glove with understanding what the business wanted to do, the strategy we were undertaking, the place where we saw ourselves in the market, and the opportunities we wanted to take advantage of,” Brewer notes. “I really feel like this technology stack is going to allow us to do that, rather than hold us back,” Brewer reiterates.

It’s a lesson many builders — especially those navigating today’s capital-constrained and margin-pressured environment — are starting to internalize. Leadership is no longer just about picking the right land or spec — it’s about giving your team the right tools to win, together.