Marcus and Millichap
Deal Management Application
Marcus & Millichap is a large commercial real estate investment firm in the US and Canada. They were in need of a tool, integrated into their intranet, for managing their real estate loans. Their current tool for doing this was clunky, slow, and had an interface inconsistent with other tools employees were used to using, making it less familiar and confusing.
Challenge
Design and develop an application for efficiently managing real estate loans, ensuring integration with their existing data, security and interface design, without disrupting their current database schema tied to existing reports and processes
Solution
Familiarize ourselves with their processes, user roles, and data structures, while using newer technologies such as SQL Server Reporting Services and client side JavaScript MVC frameworks, to create a logical, organized, fast, and user-friendly tool
How We Did It
We became experts in Marcus & Millichap’s loan approval process, analyzing documentation of their highly complex business rules, and meeting frequently with their IT team and loan administrators to capture the nuance needed within the application workflow. We created innovative processes and data relationships while maintaining the existing data structure for backwards compatibility.
Seamless UI Integration
Capturing complexity in layout
Our design team reviewed Marcus & Millichap’s existing intranet user interface and style guide to create a consistent and familiar experience for their users. Our designers also faced the challenge of creating layouts that capture a complex workflow while being flexible to multiple devices. To do this they focused on making distinct visual sections to break up the process into manageable task groups. They also optimized spacing to show as much content as needed on screen, while allowing some breathing room for readability.
A Faster Approach
Optimizing for performance
We wanted to give Marcus & Millichap a huge boost in application performance. We chose to employ the knockout.js framework so that data loads and saves would be minimized. Using an MVC based architecture with knockout.js significantly raised the bar for internal application standards at the company.
Enterprise Integration
Leveraging multiple data sources
Marcus & Millichap is a large organization with a long history of creating technical solutions to optimize their business workflow and enable communication across the company. It was imperative that we continued to support existing points of cross application integration. This started with authentication to their IDM and then continued with leveraging other data sources when required. We were able to work with each team to connect all of the dots required for this complex application.
Reporting Upgrades
We identified a critical need for Marcus & Millichap to upgrade from Crystal Reports to SQL Server Reporting Services in order to simplify and migrate complex business logic into a better location for future work, and align with the rest of their reporting infrastructure and current technologies. We quickly strategized on how to upgrade their most complex reports and performed the upgrades while adding new data points and functionality to support our deal management application. Our database architects worked closely with Marcus & Millichap’s internal IT group to update information going into their existing data warehouse to make sure all data synced across the company.
