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Beazer Home Finder

Company Overview:

Beazer Homes is the nation’s 5th largest homebuilder based on the number of home closings per year. Project Overview: Integrate a new application within the Beazer.com site that would allow users to select the criteria that are most important to them and then analyze the results in order to recommend the best Beazer home fit. The criteria includes variables such as price, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, commute distance, etc…

Challenges:

• The application was written in Java and the Beazer.com website was written in Active Server Pages – two completely different programming platforms.
• The application required a 4 server set-up including an Oracle Database server, while the Beazer site ran exclusively on a SQL back-end.
• Once a user completes the application, there was no way to save or record that user’s search results.
• The site is constantly being updated by agents and marketing personnel all over the country. The application would have to have the most up-to-date information to give users the most relevant data.

Implications:

• Users may become frustrated if the tool can not be applied to (or originate with) the other custom applications on www.beazer.com.
• Stale data could produce inaccurate recommendations to users.

Solutions:

• Definition 6 integrated the Java pages of the application with the custom ASP pages of the Beazer.com website.
• The start page was re-written in ASP in order to track the user completion percentages and include numbers in with other key business indicator reports.
• A daily data transfer is completed through a custom XML platform in order to insure that the inventory being viewed by users is never more than 24 hours old.
• Additionally, the application was integrated with the My Beazer Folder application so users can save their results and Beazer can more accurately use data for future target marketing.

Technologies Used:

• Java
• Active Server
• Oracle
• SQL 2000
• WIN 2000 Server Cluster
• Akami
• ASP
• FLASH
• XML

Results:

Please Contact Us to learn the results.

See Related:

Homebuilders case studies
Application Development & Data Integration Services case studies
Solutions for Sales and Marketing case studies