Focus Room

The Company

The Focus Room is a leading market research and focus group provider, enabling clients to test and research their products effectively. Using the latest technology and a pool of over 100,000 names, The Focus Room provides accurate research solutions to leading companies around the world.

The Challenge

Focus Room's existing DOS-based software created barriers to their growth and cost the company time and money.

When selecting participants for focus groups, Focus Room's consultants need to query their user database using multiple data sets, but their existing software could not perform these queries. The queries it could perform took a long time to complete.

The limitations of their software created problems with profile accuracy. The limited number of attributes that were stored in the database was insufficient to screen focus group participants. Once the system generated an appropriate list, Focus Room staff had to manually review the data and contact participants to verify the required information.

The existing software's reporting capabilities required all reports be printed, resulting in large printing and paper costs.

The Solution

After a detailed business and technical requirement gathering process, ECPGroup delivered developed a two-layered application architecture containing a Web-based extranet/intranet and a data warehouse layer. This custom solution reduced costs, sped up the business cycle, and made their data more accurate and valuable.

The intranet/extranet layer serves several purposes. The extranet allows the 50,000 focus group participants to build and manage their data profile independently, dramatically increasing the accuracy of the data and reducing internal administration of this information. The intranet gives Focus Room finite control over the profile data, unlimited query capability, and powerful workflow and collaboration tools. Managers can now assign jobs through the software and employees can work together and with focus group participants in real time over the Web.

The data warehouse updates in real time and provides the scalability the business required. Focus Room now dynamically builds profile data sets it needs for focus group selection, thereby increasing the value and accuracy of its data. Despite the dramatic increase in information. The software is exponentially faster than the previous system in both storage and retrieval.

Finally, reports are created dynamically, using multiple criteria, and is Web-based, eliminating the need for costly and cumbersome paper reports.