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Technology
Jun 11, 2009
By: Richard Malpica, Yardi Systems
One challenge that arises when a real estate company seeks new opportunities in the international arena is managing an ever-expanding domain as one coherent, unified enterprise.
Industry leader Cushman & Wakefield offers a compelling example of the benefits of using an open-architecture platform to centralize widely dispersed operations. Leveraging its core property management and accounting system, the company consolidated more than 30 diverse databases containing property portfolios in 42 countries across six continents, all onto one platform. This platform, centrally designed and globally deployed, serves to enforce enterprise-wide compliance with policies and procedures while eliminating numerous redundancies.
Uniting operations onto a single platform further empowers Cushman & Wakefield’s reporting strengths. Managers in any location can call up a variety of reports—budgets, actuals, prior-year comparisons, year-by-month comparisons, forecasts, et cetera—easily and instantly. With global portfolio data available in one place, all reports--grouped or stratified by continent, country, currency or language--can now support “drill-down” through multiple layers to the transaction record and image.
What has been the payoff of open architecture for Cushman & Wakefield? Supporting the tenfold growth of its portfolio while decreasing support staff by 15 percent. Moreover, open architecture by definition allows for the coupling of value-add products (whether purchased or developed in house) to the core product, yielding numerous efficiencies and valuable features. The real estate service provider has done just this, in areas such as vendor screening, invoice processing, disbursement processing and benchmarking.
The compelling nature of possible innovations within an open-architecture environment has provided Cushman & Wakefield with practical solutions to vexing challenges. As the company has demonstrated, open architecture offers the promise of virtually unlimited efficiencies for real estate companies whose operations cross national borders. Rather than think globally and act locally, you can think and act globally—and reap immediate, tangible rewards in the form of efficiencies as well as command and control across the enterprise.
Richard Malpica is vice president & general manager of the Eastern region for Yardi Systems.
By: Richard Malpica, Yardi Systems
One challenge that arises when a real estate company seeks new opportunities in the international arena is managing an ever-expanding domain as one coherent, unified enterprise.Industry leader Cushman & Wakefield offers a compelling example of the benefits of using an open-architecture platform to centralize widely dispersed operations. Leveraging its core property management and accounting system, the company consolidated more than 30 diverse databases containing property portfolios in 42 countries across six continents, all onto one platform. This platform, centrally designed and globally deployed, serves to enforce enterprise-wide compliance with policies and procedures while eliminating numerous redundancies.
Uniting operations onto a single platform further empowers Cushman & Wakefield’s reporting strengths. Managers in any location can call up a variety of reports—budgets, actuals, prior-year comparisons, year-by-month comparisons, forecasts, et cetera—easily and instantly. With global portfolio data available in one place, all reports--grouped or stratified by continent, country, currency or language--can now support “drill-down” through multiple layers to the transaction record and image.
What has been the payoff of open architecture for Cushman & Wakefield? Supporting the tenfold growth of its portfolio while decreasing support staff by 15 percent. Moreover, open architecture by definition allows for the coupling of value-add products (whether purchased or developed in house) to the core product, yielding numerous efficiencies and valuable features. The real estate service provider has done just this, in areas such as vendor screening, invoice processing, disbursement processing and benchmarking.
The compelling nature of possible innovations within an open-architecture environment has provided Cushman & Wakefield with practical solutions to vexing challenges. As the company has demonstrated, open architecture offers the promise of virtually unlimited efficiencies for real estate companies whose operations cross national borders. Rather than think globally and act locally, you can think and act globally—and reap immediate, tangible rewards in the form of efficiencies as well as command and control across the enterprise.
Richard Malpica is vice president & general manager of the Eastern region for Yardi Systems.
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