One site visit instead of three: how Cedar Crest Gardens cut duplicate trips and got its field crews adopting SiteDNA on their own

Customer context

Cedar Crest Gardens is a full-service landscape company in Dallas, Texas, handling design, installation, and maintenance for both residential and commercial clients, from recurring maintenance accounts to one-off design-build projects. Its teams are distributed and multilingual, with project managers, horticulturists, an architect, and a Mexico-based team all needing to stay aligned on what is happening at each property.

Susanna Morin, a consulting data scientist and internal champion for new tools, has led the rollout of SiteDNA. Eduardo Rodriguez, a co-owner who oversees site visits and works directly with the project managers, has built it into the day-to-day workflow on the ground.

The challenge

Before SiteDNA, keeping everyone aligned on a project meant a patchwork of communication that was hard to act on:

• Overlapping site visits. Multiple managers and supervisors would visit the same property just to get the same visual. Eduardo noted this was good for the customer but tied up money for the company that could have been spent on other properties.
• Long, hard-to-follow emails. One property write-up ran sentence after sentence, an essay, as Susanna put it, leaving readers unable to tell which plant or area was even being described.
• Bulky, inconsistent videos. Walkthrough videos ate up phone storage (maxing out roughly ten phones at one point) and often panned around without making clear which tree or bed was the subject.
• A language barrier in the field. Key crew members are more comfortable in Spanish than English, making written, client-facing documentation a challenge.

The net effect was confusion, rework, and no single, reliable record of a project that the whole team could see.

Winning over a person of routine

Eduardo is the first to admit he is not a natural early adopter. By his own description, he is a person of routine: he orders the same meal without looking at the menu, keeps the same daily schedule, and walks into Costco with a fixed mental checklist. Change is not something he reaches for often.

That is what makes his response to SiteDNA notable. After seeing it and hearing where the product was headed, he decided it was worth changing his process for, and today he is the one embedding it into the team’s daily workflow. When someone that rooted in routine chooses to change how he works, it says more about the tool than any enthusiast could.

The solution

Cedar Crest built SiteDNA into its landscape-project workflow so that one person can document a project once and everyone else can see it without being there. A project manager does the walkthrough and logs each item on the site with photos, then shares the SiteDNA report in the project chat. From there the architect, the client-facing team, and the internal crews all work from the same report.

A couple of things helped adoption stick on the ground:

• Bridging the language barrier. A Spanish-speaking crew lead dictates his notes in Spanish, then translates them to English with a couple of clicks right inside SiteDNA, so his reports come out client-ready.
• Sharing that fits the field. The team drops a live SiteDNA report link straight into the project chat, so the whole crew can open the current report on their phones without passing files around.

Cedar Crest has written SiteDNA into its formal project lifecycle as a standard step across every phase: creating the project file during prep, daily photo updates during installation, and final documentation at project completion and through the warranty period. Their Overlap Rule, a core operating principle, says managers should not visit the same property unless there is a scheduled walkthrough, a major issue escalation, a client meeting, or a final walkthrough. That is the discipline SiteDNA is built to make possible.

Early results

Cedar Crest is running SiteDNA on its active, already-sold landscape projects today. The team is still early in the rollout, so the wins so far are operational rather than financial.

What’s next

With SiteDNA now part of how Cedar Crest runs its landscape projects, the team is looking at where it can create value next, including using the same documentation to support enhancement sales to existing clients. As adoption deepens, Cedar Crest plans to put clearer measures around that impact.

I want to have some measurable, quantifiable goal that we met. Right now we’re saving cost by reducing that overlap, and there’s a lot more we can do.

— Susanna Morin, Cedar Crest Gardens