Service: re-engineering
Solution type: web application
Business area: real estate, internet, workflow and business process automation
Customer: A NYSE-listed company working in the real estate business for over 125 years. The Customer provides real estate transaction services and related services to mortgage lenders, real estate developers and brokers, lawyers and homebuyers. WonderLand has over 700 offices and 10,000 agents in the USA, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America.
Period: 2002-2004
Key problems
One of the services the Customer offers to its customers is WonderLand Connection. This online order management tool integrates information from the order and production systems and provides commercial and residential customers with 24-hour access to real estate transaction processes and documents. WonderLand Connection allows some or all parties to the transaction to: open orders, track status, read and print out the documents related to the transaction, order and track vendor services, add all transaction due dates to an online calendar, deliver the closing papers and policies electronically.
Solution
The Customer considered a number of third party service providers and selected Arcadia, Inc. for the job of developing WonderLand Connection. By then, Arcadia and the Customer had a three-year history of cooperation. This partnership started with a small pilot project that Arcadia performed for WonderLand three years earlier. Later, Arcadia developed several projects for WonderLand, including separate modules of WonderLand Connection. Arcadia had already established for WonderLand a dedicated team of IT professionals who were only working on WonderLand projects. For the task of developing WonderLand Connection, the team was expanded as was required by the project's scale. During the project over 500 new features were implemented.
Development tools
For the development of WonderLand Connection, Arcadia used the Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach. The main goal of this approach is to present new features to the Customer as soon as possible. Under this approach, almost every new feature is prototyped in order to stabilize the user interface at an earlier stage. Then, each feature goes through a number of iterations in order to improve its functionality.
Duration and scope
~ 3 years / ~ 30 person-years