Global Real Estate Institute

Case Study: Content Management System and CRM Customisation

Global Real Estate Institute (GRI) is a London-based company that organises real estate conferences worldwide.

The problem

When GRI approached FelineSoft, they were experiencing growing pains, caused in part by the software being used to run the business. This was a FoxPro database that had organically grown over a number of years and was no longer meeting the requirements of GRI; further customisation or extensions would have been cumbersome and costly to implement and would only provide a short extended life span. Furthermore, the Fox Pro database was causing the locking of records and other related multi-user problems.

The Goals

GRI runs property events on a global scale with events in all major continents. A new system would be required to manage the data and support the business processes involved in both the selling and running of these events. What GRI needed was a user-friendly framework with a multi-user environment which was not only robust, but also capable of integration with other systems and software. Another requirement of a new system was that it could support foreign language characters such as Russian and Chinese.

In addition to these back office requirements, GRI needed to reduce the administration of maintaining its website content. The GRI website is the central resource for marketing its property events and details of all events including current, forthcoming and past events are clearly displayed on the site. Therefore a content management system which would also provide data consistency with the new back-office system for their website was also required.

Delivery

Having proposed Microsoft CRM Dynamics 3.0 as the ideal solution for their database, we started work on migrating the last three years of GRI’s event data from the Fox Pro database to a new CRM installation.

At the same time, FelineSoft’s CMS system was built into the GRI website with integration to the new CRM installation to enable data synchronization; data-caching was used to ensure the performance of the website was not compromised. Finally, following on from the data migration into CRM, some customisation was required to help cut down on administration, such as the automatic generation of orders and invoices in the sales process.

Conclusion

The nature of GRI’s business means that its events management staff spend a lot of time attending events abroad, and further expansion of the business was being heavily restricted by the amount of time staff had to spend on the administration of taking bookings. Their new integrated back office system with its streamlined processes means that the current staff are more productive and the company can continue to expand without having to take on additional administrative staff.