write+up

STS realty is as a small realty group specialized in renting and selling properties in the Southwest Florida region. The business started off in 2007 as a partnership, with only 2 employees and focused only on renting and managing other people’s properties. The company grew its activities based on its core competency of managing properties. This means that they assured client’s properties were in good conditions even if there was no one living there, when a new tenant entered or when a tenant left. Today, 3 years later, the business has hired four more realtors and increased the portfolio of houses managed by its consultants. Also, STS now rents, resells and manages its own properties as part of its activities. In total STS realty group has 50 houses to which it is responsible for (both in terms of sales and rentals), 50 current tenants and seasonal clients.
 * 1 – Company Summary**
 * 1.1 – Brief history, team and services**

STS realty group deals with 4 types of clients. Basically, they fall into two types of businesses: renting and selling property. Each of the business has diversified customer segments. Property Renting: - Seasonal clients (Short-Term Tenants) - Current Tenants (Long-Term Tenants) Property Selling: - Property owners - Buyers
 * 1.2 – Clients (Target market) Key Business **

(Can we converge these two parts to the renting business parts? Then we can explain each parts in a separate paragraph.) The company provides both short-term and long-term renting services. The short-term renting would be more expensive without signing contract and waiting for run-over time. Compared to the short-term renting, long-term renting would be a little bit cheaper, usually 10% cheaper than regular price. But it takes about 2 weeks to run over the property. (from policy of regular apartment, correct it if it's necessary) To satisfy the tenants, the company should be able to respond to the clients' requirment as soon as possible, which requires working staff has an effective and efficient solutions to access to the accurate information. A great part of the business revolves around seasonal clients. These clients rent properties for vacations or for short periods of time during Southwest Florida’s high season (December to April). STS rents its own houses and their managed properties to seasonal clients and they compose a great part of their clientele. Seasonal clients may or may not be recurring clients. However, in the region in which STS focuses its services, most of these clients come back every year during the high season. Yet, these clients have no obligation to return to the same properties or to rent a house from the same company throughout the years. Therefore, STS needs to focus its efforts in marketing effectively towards seasonal clients and perfecting its services, to assure that they will be satisfied and returning customers. Current tenants also compose a large portion of STS’s clients. Not only that, but also they are the clients to which the company’s consultants deploy most of the time and effort to deal with. Current tenants differ from seasonal tenants because they live in a property for longer than 6 months. These tenants’ concerns and needs must be fulfilled immediately in order to guarantee quality of service. Switching cost is another key strategy in this area. Qualitative services would increase client's switching costs, which would keep them stay with the STS. Furthermore, dealing with tenants also includes receiving payments, registering for received or pending payments and conducting regular checks and reports on rented property conditions.
 * 1.21 Property Renting **
 * Seasonal Clients** (Short-Term Tenants)
 * Current tenants** (Long-Term Tenants)

The company functions as a real estate agency specializing in both selling and buying property for the clients. For the property owners, experienced consultants are responsible for the property maintenance, assessment and transaction. But buyers require more flexibility from the company. They may not only need the detailed information about a certain property, but also some alternative for them to compare. These clients are the owners of houses that STS manages. STS is responsible of maintaining their property’s conditions perfect if they are renting it to a tenant or if the house is empty. STS consultants need to permanently check these clients properties to address and communicate any issue that might arise. (I think we need the price strategy here.) Buyers are, mostly, one-time only clients. They come to the company’s realtors and consultants for help with property purchases in the region. Even though they might not be returning customers, buyers are important for the company’s revenue because the company gets to keep a percentage of the sale of a property present in their listings. Also, buyers include investors, who buy properties in the area as a form of investment. Investors can be return clients and highly lucrative.
 * 1.22 Property Selling **
 * Property owners**
 * 1.24 – Buyers**

As a realty management group, a lot of STS’s activities depend on outsorced services. Properties’s maintance depend on contractors, plumbers, electreicians and house cleaning staff that are hired on a need basis.
 * 2 – Personel**

Even though STS has grown considerably since its start-up, the company still uses its initial database system. Basically, the STS employees use Excel spread sheets (MSoffice) to create and keep files of all of its properties and clients. The “property” spread sheet contains information on address, proprietor name (proprietor, as a client, also has an additional file with all information), and current status of the property (rented, for sale, seasonal or empty). The “client’s” spread sheets contains in depth information of clients such as: name, address, phone number, client type, credit history and check status and a section for comments. The “Excel system” was compatible with a small client database and few proprieties of a start-up company. The method rendered consistent information about all clients that were generated according to what the partners in the company deemed important to keep track of.
 * 1.4 – Current database system**


 * 2 – E-business Technology strategy**

As mentioned, the current Excel system at use is not compatible with STS’s current operations. The system still works but it isn’t efficient anymore. The categories that used to be clear and simple began to overlap and became more complex. With the current system, realtors and consultants have a hard time finding appropriate and complete information on properties and clients, to fit their daily operation’s needs. Thus, in response to STS’s growth it is important that the company implements a new, more complete, e-business technology strategy. In order to analyze which option would best suit the business’s needs, our team conducted an interview with one of the initial partners of the company and listened to his concerns and expectations relative to a possible new system. The input generated through the interview paired with our analysis of the company’s operations (as seen in the first part of this document) will propose a suggestion of a more complete, efficient and effective e-business strategy for STS realty group. Ronald Surliuga, start-up partner in STS realty group, in an interview with our business analysis group, brought up the following concerns for a new system implementation: - A new system has to account for all the client types and has to be considerably more efficient than the existing one. - Any new software introduced has to be extremely user friendly and simple. The existing system might not be so effective but at least the realtors are already familiar with it, a new system should not require additional (extraneous) training to use. - The e-business solution proposed should connect all the types of data required for the business’s operations, making it easily accessible to all the team when they need it. Ronald emphasizes that this is currently the main issue with the existing system. In this section ahead we are going to review the pros and cons of different IT solutions for STS business. STS is a small business, however is aiming at achieving bigger scope of activity in the future. With that in mind, we have a budget of $5000 that we plan on investing on proposed IT solutions. Our IT proposed budget is to be allocated between solving one problem and taking advantage of an opportunity: Another reason STS wants to upgrade its existent IT infrastructure is to take advantage of growing trends. For example, one is Canadians that are going to vacations in Florida. The majority of this population is elderly, retired with a good amount of disposable income and is part of the "baby boomers" generation thus is a vast population. Here is a chart referring back to the number of Canadians that visited Florida in 2008 from Statistics Canada: This is only a rough idea and does provide for definitive decision making, however it can be paired up with data on later trends to get a grasp of whether this trend is valuable enough from a strategic point and whether it can be sustainable for the long term. Also, Florida is an attractive destination for many travelers from around the world.Being present in the most powerful indexing site in the world, Google has become a must for many small businesses. As a result we consider investing in a SEO and a more dynamic web site. However, we are on a rather small budget and thus will try to find the most cost effective solution out there for our web marketing needs. According to the managerial perspective, the main issue with the existing system is a lack of efficient connection of the existing data. The best solution in this case would be to implement a __database management system.__ This e-business technology format would facilitate archiving and access of information and new information input.
 * 2.1 – Issues with the current E-business technology at use.**
 * 2.2 – Management’s input**
 * 2.3 – Business Analysts Initial Conclusion – Potential system formats Pros and Cons**
 * -The first is aimed at achieving better integration of information.** This is rooted in achieving better IT and for that we propose 2 different iterations of DBS for which we review a set of criteria to find the best fit for the business.
 * -The second is getting more clients in from domestic and international markets to expand the seasonal clients base.**
 * 2.31 – Database management system**
 * Solution Number 1**

Oracle Database 11//g// Standard Edition
Data centers are big scale software and hardware implementations that host applications and perform complex computations.They typically consist of different server and storage silos, integrated by software.They are expensive to maintain, some data on data centers shows that 30% is spent on integration and assurance that all the individual components work well together.Apart from being expensive they are also inefficient.They are often over-provisioned with spare processing and storage capacity, resulting in under utilization trough the center. The main goal for companies has been to achieve the level of consolidation that data centers allow for at a much lower price. Virtual environments allow for this to happen sharing all applications on a shared virtual environment.Oracle `s Database Standard Solution 11g can integrate and consolidate software and hardware.Server and storage consolidation can lead to savings from pure economies of scale alone.

Oracle Database Standard Edition can only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 4 sockets. If licensing by Named User Plus, the minimum is 5 Named User Plus licenses.(Oracle.com)
 * It costs $350 per user and it has to be at least 5 users( approximately $2100 for 6 users ), ability to scale as the business grows by use of [|Real Application Clusters]
 * The robustness of Oracle for SMEs, a very affordable, flexible and convenient solution
 * Ability to run on [|Windows], [|Linux], and Unix operating systems and easily manage with automated, self-managing capabilities
 * Easy and seamless integration of applications with Oracle Application Express, Oracle SQL Developer, and [|Oracle Data Access Components for Windows]


 * Solution Number 2**

Web Development and SEO

Do we really need a customer relationship management software? We can propose a online self-service database for customers to check the property available. If they are interested, they can either book the property online or talk to a personal assistant individually. I really doubt the value of customer relationship management system cuz the size of customer group we are dealing with is not very big. Based on our appraisal of the company’s operations, our team concluded that a lot of their operations rely on interaction with customers. In this case, a good e-business strategy should involve a CRM software that facilitates this interaction between STS and its clients. A well implemented CRM system would not only enhance customer relationship terms of communication, but also would help in marketing effectively to seasonal clients.
 * 2.32- Customer Relationship Management Software**
 * 2.33 – Enterprise Resource Planning software**

This solution would possibly be more complex in terms of usage but would comprise a more robust solution in terms of data and resource management than simply a database management system. With an ERP in place, STS can also kep track of its realtors and consultants schedules for example. An ERP system would facilitate database management (clients and properties’ information), internal and external resource managements (consultants schedules and outsourced employees) and the company’s finances (including tenants and buyer’s payments).
 * 3- Proposed Solution**