Customer Success - First American Field Services

FAFS Selects Microsoft .NET for its Vendor Management Application and Saves $1,000,000 Annually

When First American Field Services (FAFS), one of the largest providers of property inspections and preservation field services in the US mortgage industry, wanted to streamline its vendor communications, it contracted with Microsoft Gold partner Ajilon Consulting to develop its Vendor Plus project using the Infragistics NetAdvantage toolset. Vendor Plus is a Microsoft ASP.NET application that allows for both connected and disconnected usage. The preferred platform for disconnected use is the Tablet PC.

Situation

First American Field Services (FAFS), one of the largest providers of property inspection and property preservation field service organizations in the US mortgage industry, maintains relationships with approximately 3,000 independent contractors. These strong relationships make the company a priority customer and afford cost management opportunities not available to other contractors. At the same time, communicating effectively with 3,000 independent contractors can be a challenge.

FAFS was faxing or printing and expressing work orders to its vendors in the field, getting maintenance and inspection results back by the same channels, and finally keying in the results. FAFS needed to streamline these processes to reduce costs and improve contractual compliance.

Since FAFS had legacy AS400 systems in place and experience with IBM WebSphere and MQ, FAFS considered implementing a WebSphere-based solution using Java and J2EE. However, FAFS also had an existing relationship with IT services firm Ajilon Consulting. After discussing the overall project and evaluating alternatives with Ajilon Consulting, FAFS decided that Microsoft ®Visual Studio® .NET development system and the Microsoft .NET Framework would be the most productive choice for their environment.

"The development costs, world-class developer tools from Infragistics, time to market, and deployment costs all combined to drive the decision to use the .NET Framework rather than J2EE," says John Keefauver, .NET Business Development Manager at Ajilon Consulting. "Once we made that decision, it was easy to select the Infragistics NetAdvantage toolset to assist with our development environment. We hada lot of experience using these controls with great success, going back to the project we did to help Verizon rebuild in New York City after the 9/11 attacks.”

FAFS wanted all its vendors to be able to access the new system over the Web. In addition, it wanted vendors to be able to take information into the field, and enter information on the spot. Rather thandevelop two separate applications, Ajilon Consulting built a Web application that could operate even when disconnected.

Solution

The Vendor Plus application uses MicrosoftASP.NET and the Infragistics ASP.NET Grid and other controls for its presentation layer. The business logic layer includes Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET objects and COM+objects. The business layer can generate reports, and communicate with otherprocesses over Web services and message queues. The business communicates with the database through a separate data access layer.

The data access layer uses data objects, Microsoft ADO.NET datasets, and XML Datasets. The ADO.NET datasets communicate with a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database when running on a server, or with an MSDE database when running on a laptop or Tablet PC.

The local database synchronizes with an IBM DB2 database running on the AS/400 using a synchronization engine written in C# and Visual Basic .NET development system. Communications happen through an XML data stream.

The preferred platform for field deployment of the Vendor Plus application is a Tablet PC. "The application is in production now with a staged rollout," says Mike Zabkowski, Vice President of MIS at FAFS. "We have about 600 vendors up on the system now, and we're rolling out about 50 a week to thefield. Our goal is to have all 3,000 field representatives on the system by October 31st. Our standard computer for running in disconnected mode is a Toshiba Tablet PC, but the application can actually rundisconnected on just about any laptop."

Benefits

The Vendor Plus application was developed quickly and is already saving money and improving compliance. Even early in the deployment, it is clear that the application will be a good base for additional features that will help the business.

The application is reducing data entry errors thanks to disconnected operation with realtime validation from the ASP.NET controls. It is giving FAFS shorter turnaround to and from its vendors, and improved contractual compliance. It is also providing a dramatic reduction of courier costs.

Productive Development

The development cycle for the Vendor Plus application was quite short. Keefauver: "We used an iterative development process with rapid prototyping, which was helped considerably by the Visual Studio .NETdevelopment environment and the capabilities of the .NET Framework. We were able to leverage existing resources through the use of XML Web services and the Infragistics toolset, which gave us a very cost-effective solution."

"Developing this application was a sixmonth process. We took a month for planning, three months to develop the initialASP.NET application, and another two months to implement disconnected operationand refine the application. We had five developers, one database administrator, one business analyst, and one program manager on the development team."

"We are saving on the order of $1,000 per week for development in the .NET Framework over what we'd pay for J2EE development," adds Zabkowski.

Part of the reason for the short implementation time was the use of an ASP.NET Web presentation layer on the Tablet PC as well as the server. "We were able to leverage the ASP.NET code that was written for the 'connected' application", says Keefauver. "With only a minor amount of additional work, we were then able to have a 'disconnected' mode. Ideally, we would have a Microsoft Windows® Forms application using the ink capabilities of the Infragistics Framework running locally on the Tablet, but that would also add some layer of complexity in distribution and would require a significantly larger development effort than what we chose to do. At some point in the future, we may look at doing that, but for now, this was the most effective manner of designing it for our particular case."

Cost Savings

"We were spending $90,000 a month on overnight shipping," says Zabkowski, "not to mention our costs for data entry and quality control. This application will eliminate the shipping costs and significantly reduce our costs for re-entry of data. This will free our people for more productive work."

Versatility and Futures

"By using MSDE in a disconnected scenario, the development team was able to implement a single ASP.NET application while gaining the functionality that typically comes with a client/server model. Also, theTablet PC platform gives the end user several different methods of inputting data, and this application will support both the ink capabilities of the Tablet PC and its voice recognition features," adds Keefauver.

"Additionally, using digital cameras and the efficient form factor of the Tablet PC, the vendor - who is the user - should haveeverything he needs to perform a site inspection in a completely digital manner.Finally, GPS capabilities are being built in, to help in future releases of route planning, visit verification, and traceability of the vendors" says Zabkowski.

"We want to be able to tell the field representative the best order of visits, and the best route to take between one site and another. We also want to be able to capture the global position of the vendor when an entry was made, so that we can prove that the report was made at the correct site."

For more information about Infragistics NetAdvantage go to:
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage.aspx

NetAdvantage is a complete presentation layer toolset ideal for building commercial class interfaces for Microsoft® Windows®-based applications, XML Web Services, and Web Solutions.

For more information on Infragistics Presentation Layer Framework go to:
http://www.infragistics.com/learn/presentation-layer-framework.aspx

For information regarding the increasing importance of presentation layer development within the application development lifecycle go to:
http://www.infragistics.com/learn/gartner.aspx

About Infragistics

Infragistics is the market leader in providing a broad range of presentation layer development tools and services for building applications utilizing Microsoft .NET, and COM environments. Over the past 15 years, Infragistics has received over 220 product awards and industry vendor of the year awards from market-leading publications and resellers. Infragistics' diverse product line for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Tablet PC, and COM environments are used worldwide in nearly every Fortune 2000 Company, over 96,000 corporations and 200,000 independent developers and consultants. For more information or to arrange an introduction or technical demonstration of Infragistics development tools, please visit www.infragistics.com or call us at +1 (800) 231-8588.