Case Study
Lynd Co.
Key Business Challenge
The Lynd Company, a San Antonio-based property management firm, needed a way for interested parties to view Lynd's property portfolio as well as inspect financial reports online. Lynd's previous method of generating financial statements was labor-intensive and time-consuming, and they were looking to make their business more transparent to prospective investors.
Background
The Lynd Company manages multifamily investments for high-net-worth clients as well as institutional money managers. This privately held firm has underwritten, financed, brokered, or purchased over three quarters of a billion dollars in assets over the past twenty-five years. Their internal subsidiary, Lynd Residential Properties Fund, has also purchased $300 million in assets comprising over four thousand units. In early 2005, they entered a new round of fund-raising to secure additional capital, and quick access to readily available financial statements became a necessity to speed this process.
Denim Group Solution
Denim Group selected Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003 technology to build a secure portal for Lynd's financial statements. Denim Group's usage of SharePoint provided version control for Lynd's documents, and gave Lynd's accounting staff the ability to quickly and accurately modify and revise this time-sensitive information. Utilizing custom .NET development, Denim Group was able to create a custom web part to display scrolling stock information from Yahoo! Finance to all portal users. In addition, the integration of SharePoint allowed Lynd to brand their portal as they saw fit. By configuring the platform in this manner, Denim Group provided business transparency to Lynd's current investors, and with Lynd's ability to revise the data in real-time, clients were able to review the most current and accurate information.
ROI Value Statement
Denim Group delivered a portal to the Lynd Company that provided secure and flexible transparency to investors and better connected Lynd's data (property information and financial statements) to its ultimate source. The modular design gave them the power to configure the portal to grow with the company, and the backend gave their internal personnel more power to publish and consolidate information. Also, given SharePoint Portal Server 2003's simple and adaptable security model, it will prove easy to give new investors the ability to inspect properties they invest in. Finally, the robustness of SharePoint will allow Lynd to expand their portal capabilities to other functional units of the company.