RadioGrupo (RG) is a group of seven radio stations located in Aguascalientes, a city in the center of México with a population of one million. Founded in 1936, RG has an estimated 70% market share according to one recent survey. Microsistemas de Aguascalientes provides technology consulting services to a number of industries including radio broadcasting, government, and commerce.
RG needed to provide its radio stations a new level of control and sophistication to handle creating the contracts, scheduling the commercials as stipulated in the contracts, controlling the invoice generation for transmitted spots, collecting the invoices, reporting comprehensive information, and forecasting for the future. Because RG had no technical staff, they turned to a local consultant, José Luis Gómez Serrano from Microsistemas de Aguascalientes, to develop this new system. Given the requirements of this project, Microsistemas de Aguascalientes proposed to use FairCom technology. Mr. Gómez had used c-tree Plus and the c-tree Servers on several other projects with excellent results. He believed that this new project was perfectly suited to this technology.
As the team from Microsistemas de Aguascalientes worked on the traffic engine, they were pleased by the performance they achieved with FairCom's technology: a one-year contract (about 15 spots a day) could be programmed in a snap, at a rate of 170 scheduled spots per second. For each spot in a contract, the system must find a suitable location on the schedule, ensuring that the specific contract constraints are met.
The entire project was based on a three-tiered model: a graphical interface using Borland's VCL model, the business rules based heavily on the C++ object paradigm, and the server interaction using the c-tree Server. This strategy worked well, particularly when developing the finer elements of the system such as the assignment of the spots on the schedule. The ample c-tree Plus API gives the programmer an assortment of functions that make it easy, powerful, and efficient to manage a database in a complex situation.
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