Mattamy Homes is a Canadian home builder that builds houses in Ottawa (my home city) and elsewhere in Ontario. Recently I received an email from Alain Thibodeau at non-linear creations who sent me a link to the new Mattamy Homes Interactive Floor Planner (IFP) that his company has created. The IFP allows new home buyers to customize the floor plan of their new house before going into the sales center to discuss it with a sales agent. This allows home buyers to easily see all the available options ahead of time.

The application also includes some cool Flex and PDF integration. You can print a personalized brochure with your selected floor plan. That's pretty cool, since it means that the PDF output is tied to the selections you make in the Flex form. Nice touch.

Many of today's web applications are cool, sexy applications that look good, but lack business value. The value to the business and end customers in this case is clear. Customers spend less time at the sales center, and can get more information when they want it. In turn, sales agents spends less time explaining all the available floor options to the customer, so the time spent with them is on more higher value activities.

Technically, the application was built using Flex 2.0.1, with the Cairngorm framework, and uses an ASP.NET backend.