Company Profile

Oakwood Worldwide is the largest temporary housing provider worldwide. With 40 years of multi-family housing experience and 30 years of industry leadership in corporate housing, Oakwood Worldwide is the most experienced leader in temporary furnished apartments. With access to over 400,000 apartments in more than 2,000 U.S. cities, as well as select locations in Canada, Asia, and Europe, 85% of Fortune 500 firms depend on Oakwood Worldwide.

Challenge

To maintain a competitive edge over other housing providers, Oakwood's management recognized the need to upgrade their disparate legacy systems. By implementing a more efficient and cost-effective process model, Oakwood hoped to increase profitability and improve the customer's ability to book and schedule reservations. With over 400,000 apartments all across the world, Oakwood needed an application that would not only query all availabilities that matched a customer's criteria, but would also allow sales agents to effectively meet those requests.

Oakwood needed the following from an application:

• A Profiles System that would allow sales agents to easily update the properties they are responsible for.
• Content Management System that would manage the layout and content of the website.
• A website with a new look and feel that would improve the customer's ability to search and book apartments.

Resolution

Oakwood Worldwide selected Liferay and its enterprise portal to implement the functionality it needed. By leveraging Liferay Portal Enterprise's framework, Liferay implemented the following:

• Profiles Portlet - Liferay helped build a Profiles portlet that allowed sales agents to manage properties they were responsible for. This included the ability to upload property images, descriptions, and other information that would help a sales agent in closing a sale.
• XSLT CMS - Oakwood's website is driven by Liferay's Content Management System. Via an XSLT templating system, Oakwood can control the content displayed on the site along with its layout.
• eInvoicing -  Liferay used web services to integrate a .NET invoicing system into its own portlet within Liferay Portal.

As opposed to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a commercial application's license alone, Oakwood Worldwide saw the advantage of using Liferay's open source software to cut costs and build a well architected, long-term solution.