ReloAction, an employee-owned business, has been providing corporate relocation services for three decades. Its corporate clients highly value the company’s experience, expertise, and dedication.
The relocation industry has been changing rapidly, making it more challenging for smaller relocation companies to compete with the giant national firms. Increasingly, corporations no longer want to do business with a large number of regional vendors. They want to work with fewer vendors, ones who can handle their needs across multiple locations.
This shift in corporate preferences meant that ReloAction needed to efficiently extend its IS services to branch offices. Previously, Microsoft FoxPro files were manually uploaded and downloaded between locations. Not only was this method clumsy and slow, but it was a tremendous waste of employee time.
Presenting problem ReloAction spent years developing and fine-tuning a custom FoxPro database that served as an extremely effective tool for its relocation consultants. Because of the expense required to implement a WAN with speeds high enough to provide reasonable access to the information from one source, the database was isolated at each of the company’s branch offices, located in California, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington. Interoffice access of common data was becoming more and more essential to providing the complete breadth of service ReloAction’s clients were demanding. For example, without this access to common data, consultants in Portland and San Francisco could be working independently on relocating the same person without knowing it.
The challenge: Share information among branch offices working with the same client.
ReloAction also evaluated other options besides a high-speed WAN. In particular, the company considered rewriting the FoxPro program using Lotus Notes to take advantage of replication between offices. But such an endeavor would have entailed a very costly—and worse, a very lengthy—conversion period to rewrite the software to run within the Lotus Notes environment. If ReloAction had chosen to implement the Lotus Notes environment outside a thin-client/server solution, it would have needed to upgrade many employees’ PCs to more expensive units capable of running Windows 95.
Hardware and software The ReloAction thin-client/server networking environment includes:
ReloAction deploys custom database, contact management, and e-mail applications over low-bandwidth connections.
ReloAction is using WinFrame to deploy its mission-critical FoxPro for MS-DOS database, Goldmine Contact Management application, and cc:Mail over low-bandwidth frame relay WAN connections.
Solution and results ReloAction’s IS department deploys a single WinFrame application server at its headquarters. This server has enabled employees in remote offices to access the FoxPro, Goldmine, and other mission-critical applications across inexpensive, low-bandwidth frame relay WAN connections. The consultants can access the same consolidated base of information, which is managed, backed up, and administered by the IS department at headquarters.
The thin-client/server single-point application management is reducing ReloAction’s cost of application ownership, since all application additions, updates, user configuration, and support occur on the centrally located WinFrame server. Remote performance accessing FoxPro for MS-DOS and other Windows applications over frame relay WAN connections has been excellent. Consolidating all mission-critical applications and information at headquarters has made it much easier for ReloAction’s managers to receive timely reports or run ad hoc queries on the activities of remote offices. In turn, managers at headquarters now find it easier to share relevant general statistics with the remote users.
ReloAction’s solution allowed the company to deploy applications and updates rapidly.
The IS department at ReloAction, like the IS departments in the other case studies, has been able to take advantage of the training and support tools provided with the WinFrame server, which include the ability to shadow branch office users. Session shadowing has significantly improved the ability of ReloAction’s IS organization to provide both training and troubleshooting to remote users.
WinFrame has enabled ReloAction to provide its branch office with services on a par with the nation’s largest relocation companies. Managers at ReloAction intend to use thin-client/server solutions with WinFrame to boost the company’s competitive advantage even further. They plan to extend the reach of ReloAction’s services directly to clients via the Internet. They also plan to upgrade their FoxPro application to a Windows version and allow clients to access the database through the familiar HTML interface of the Web. Clients will be able to make direct requests for services as well as track their relocation status.