Disclaimer - Alliance Digital Repository

5
Summary:
Affordable Residential Communities is a small to mid-sized company with
approximately 1500 employees and of those 1500 employees there are roughly 150 sales
personnel, which do not include the community managers who can also sell homes. The
sales staff at ARC did not have a consistent way of tracking potential customers. Some
of the sales staff used Microsoft Excel to track customers while others used a pen and
paper or some other proprietary method. ARC was looking for a cost-effective solution
that would allow its sales staff to be able to enter potential customer information and
track those customers. The solution ARC needed would not only allow for the input of
potential customers, but would also automatically assign a customer to a sales agent if the
person who entered the customer was not a member of the sales staff. ARC believed that
a custom built CRM tool would not only help in creating future marketing initiatives
targeted at their specific customer base, but also felt it would help maintain good
relationships with current, as well as future customers. ARC also believed they would
see an increase in the sales, leases and rentals of its manufactured homes.
ARC has remote offices throughout the United States. All of these offices have
an Internet connection and most of them utilize a broadband connection. ARC wanted to
leverage the power of the Internet by using it as a portal in such a way that their sales
staff would be able to input customer data on a web page and have that data stored in a
database at their corporate office. Ideally ARC wanted to make use of the technology
they had in place to build and host this application. This technology included an Oracle
9i relational database management system (RDBMS) solution running on Linux,
Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0, and ColdFusion MX.