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Clarion
and Farm Credit Bank Of Texas
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A Market-Leading
Real Estate Appraisal tool Developed using Softvelocity's
Clarion Enterprise Edition and Microsoft SQL Server.
Who
is Farm Credit Bank of Texas?
The
Farm Credit Bank Of Texas, Federal Land Credit Associations
and Production Credit Associations of the 10th Farm Credit
District, are member-owned cooperatives which provide agricultural
loans to borrowers and stockholders in the states of Alabama,
Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. The Bank currently
has a portfolio of over $5 billion in loan volume.
The
Business Challenge: A need to advance a proven legacy system
using current technology.
To accommodate
the Bank's growth and changing requirements it became necessary
to upgrade the method used for managing and reporting Comparable
Sales statistics for the Bank's Real Estate Appraisal activities.
These statistics are a major factor when estimating the market
value of real estate or when performing real estate collateral
evaluations; they also provide valuable information for identifying
market penetration strategies.
One of
the complications was that this was to be a distributed system
(field notebook computers disconnected from a network), but
which should also be able to "sync up" certain data
pools with other notebook computers when reconnected to the
network.
The
Solution
The
Toolset
After evaluating the available off-the-shelf software packages,
the Bank turned to Softvelocity's Clarion for Windows - a
Windows Database Development tool that produces front-end
business solutions for the PC and Web, and Microsoft's Microsoft
SQL Server 2000 was selected as the database. Clarion was
used to prototype the business requirements and then build
the production application.
Configuration
The client systems are loaded with the compiled Clarion programs
along with Microsoft SQL Server desktop edition and its Merge/Replication
technology. A master database residing on a server on the
network is loaded with MSSQL. This allows for data to be shared
across all clients and for off-line application execution.
The nature of obtaining and inputting sales data is such that
the appraiser or evaluator needs the choice of being off line
whenever they desire, as typically they operate away from
the office's network resources.
Required
Resources
The
application was successfully developed and deployed by an
AS/400 programmer with no prior Windows programming experience,
and considerably faster than a development tool such as Visual
Basic would have allowed. Such is the ease of learning and
using this product - a combination of high quality manuals,
the Essentials and Foundations CD courses and Soft Velocity's
NewsGroups were all that was needed to get the programmer
up to speed for this mission-critical project. The main ingredient
for providing this accelerated learning curve was Clarion's
template based development methodology - a highly advanced
technology unique to Clarion that leverages the programmers
productivity by several orders of magnitude.
The application
was successfully deployed in April 2001 and is currently running
on more than 360 clients. Success has been defined by formal
feedback received from users and from several of Bank's competitors
who have inquired into the possibility of purchasing the product
as there is no other product in the market matching it's quality,
feature-set and stability. Thank you, Soft Velocity!
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