TECHNOLOGY TOOLBOX

Troy Dowling is a senior systems analyst with American Airlines and is Horizon administrator.

merican Airlines’ real estate portfolio encompasses more than 300 properties around the globe, including 165 in the U.S. This includes hangars, maintenance and cargo facilities and others inside terminals. The company also maintains a robust construction schedule to the current tune of US$300 million annually, although that is far below pre-911 levels of $2 billion.

   Troy Dowling, American’s senior systems analyst, says that in the late 1990s, the company determined it needed to look for an off-the-shelf product to manage its leased property. After a thorough and competitive search, the airline chose Fraser Williams’ Horizon Real Estate Solutions product.

   “Fraser Williams looked at our business processes and they showed us better ways to do some things,” Dowling says. “We customized Horizon for some specific airline things. We use it to manage all our property leases and subleases, and it keeps track of all the rent we pay our landlords.”

   Dowling says American also uses it to manage construction projects and the associated funding.

   “Horizon allows the project manager to keep track of construction, and it processes invoices associated with construction,” Dowling says.

   Fraser Williams (www.fwcommercial.com) is a U.K. company with a U.S. office in Philadelphia. The Horizon product traces its history to 1990, when it was under a different name and used primarily in the U.K. It has been available in the U.S. since 1997 and has been an Internet-based application since 2001, says Matthew Sheldrick, vice president of marketing and business development in Fraser Williams’ Americas market.

   Sheldrick says Horizon is primarily used by large corporations in the U.S. such as American Airlines, Boeing and General Motors. Outside the U.S.,

Horizon is a flexible application that can be customized to a client’s needs.

the market is divided among corporate users and investors, owners and managers. Government users, including the Royal Family, dominate the U.K. market, he says. More than 200 customers in 59 countries currently use Horizon.

   “We’ve recently put more focus on space and land management,” Sheldrick says. “We’ve added a module for managing land holdings. We have a major release every six to nine months.”

   Sheldrick believes Horizon’s greatest strength is its flexibility, allowing the application to be configured to match specific business processes.

   “We can implement dashboard-style management performance indicators with a full-blown data warehouse underneath the application that can track historic trends,” Sheldrick says. “A user can look at benchmarking this year versus last.”

   Fraser Williams gets ideas for updates from a variety of sources, including user groups that provide feedback, the overall marketplace trends and the creativity of its developers, Sheldrick says. All of the firm’s R&D is conducted at the company’s London headquarters.

   Sheldrick believes Horizon’s competitive advantage is on the financial side of the application.

   “Our financials are much stronger than any of our competitors. We are also strong in regulatory compliance and have put a lot of effort into SOX audits. Companies come out with flying colors using our applications.”

   Being a 100-percent Web-based application is also an advantage, Sheldrick believes. Ease of use is another key attribute.

   Customers may either buy a Horizon license for a specific number of users with annual maintenance and implementation service, or Fraser Williams will host servers and applications. In the license approach, the software is installed on a company’s servers.

   The U.S. market is Horizon’s largest. Sheldrick says future additions to Horizon will include improvements on existing functions, with a lot of work in facility and space management. Additional efforts are planned on the analysis side and forecasting trends, making greater use of the product’s data warehouse, he says.