Project: RealFacts Online

Company Background: RealFacts is a research organization and database publisher specializing in the multifamily housing market. Their service is used by thousands of clients across the country, and frequently forms the basis for articles run by the trade media, including The Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Orange County Register and San Jose Mercury News.

The Old Business Process: In the old flow, the company would provide clients with data that had been collected and prepared for that calendar quarter. This information was burned onto hundreds of CDs and mailed to clients across the country.

The drawbacks to this process were many:

	They used Microsoft Access to perform the data entry and manipulation. The size of their data had outgrown this package.
	It took a fair amount of time to create, address, and mail all the CDs. Each CD had to be done uniquely since each client could have a different set of subscription permissions. Plus, clients who were on the East coast would get their CDs later than clients on the West, sometimes resulting in a competitive edge for one client over another.
	The company had no way to measure how the data was being used, which report types were most popular, nor did they have a way to make sure analysis was being performed properly on the data.

The Solution: This was a perfect case for creating a Web Application to have a centralized place for clients to log in and access their subscribed data, create, and manage quotes from any standard web browser. In addition, the Realfacts team can log into their administrative section that has multiple levels of access for them to manage user accounts, geographic permission sets, and also to maintain their database via a fast and easy to use interface.

Their new online system runs on our UNIX servers, and their database of over 1,000,000 rows is easily handled by a MySQL database.

It offers their clients multiple reporting options, including a "build-your-own" section that gives the client thousands of reporting variations based on their exact specifications.

Results: Not only does Realfacts save considerable time and effort each quarter getting their data to their clients, but the team now has an insight into the frequency of each report type, as well as usage patterns that allow them to offer new reports as needed and to guide their clients towards reports that might not have been familiar to them. And, the clients now have a system that can guide them towards generating useful reports, rather than having to determine how to best interpret the raw data.