5 Questions You Should Ask Now to Make Your Buildings and Management Teams More Profitable in 2017

5 Questions You Should Ask Now to Make Your Buildings and Management Teams More Profitable in 2017

CRE team meeting

This is a guest blog from Honest Buildings.

The end of 2016 is coming fast upon us and you’re probably well into budgeting for 2017. This is the perfect time to plan for how you will make your team more efficient and profitable in the year to come. Here are five questions you should ask yourself now to set your CRE teams up for success in 2017.

#1: Does everyone have visibility into projects, individually and at the portfolio level?

Real estate cycles are long, but many project-related decisions need to happen fast. If your team is waiting for weekly reports or tracking colleagues down by phone to get bidding updates, you’re losing valuable time.

With top-down transparency, a number of important goals are accomplished:

  • Upper management should have complete visibility into the status of all projects at all times, from a birds-eye view to bid-specific details.
  • Regional managers should be able to easily identify pricing trends, workflow cycles and vendor talent gaps.
  • Property managers should be able to efficiently communicate with vendors and manage relationships.
  • The accounting team should be able to quickly track and report on capital spending and verify that projects were competitively bid according to company policies.

The ideal scenario allows users to easily drill down from the macro view of projects into specific bid documentation, team conversation, internal vendor reviews and more.

Your team needs a project management platform that gives quick access to data points across your portfolio, including bids received, bid delta from budget, key delivery dates and insight into project manager workload.

#2: Can we automate more administrative tasks?

Bid leveling is a great example. From eating up hours merging multiple spreadsheets to triggering migraines trying to figure out which cell has an incorrect formula, bid leveling can be a nightmare. Project managers are turned into data entry drudges and sidelined from driving value-add activities. Additionally, teams that manually level bids are disincentivized from triple-bidding projects, a proven path to cost reduction.

Automated bid leveling tools can manage the administrative work of aggregating, organizing and, to some degree, analyzing data input by vendors. Your cost-savings goals will align with the limited capacity your team has to manage the process with a platform that will let them create and save custom bid leveling templates, highlight deviances across bid entries and place some of the data entry work onto the vendors.

Another point here is that accurate forecasting requires data from a variety of sources and across financial periods. At some point, this information needs to be gathered and aggregated. Rather than making this a separate step, think about enterprise technology software that makes it automatic and seamless. The amount of work saved is sort of breathtaking, and when executives see this in action it’s easy to understand the value of these technologies.

#3: Are our systems working harmoniously together?

So how can you push every data point, document, message and report into one platform for your entire company? Well, you can’t and you probably shouldn’t, even if you could. Anything that tries to do everything rarely does anything well.

The answer is to look at technology platforms that drive value for your company’s critical activities—like Hightower and VTS for leasing, Honest Buildings for project management and procurement, Rentlytics for multifamily revenue insights—and thoughtfully assemble a real estate technology stack that works together to create value. Modern platforms can integrate via an API so you have the benefit of accessing aggregated data without weakening the functionality your specialized teams need.

All project data, including real-time status of invoice approvals and payments, should be transmitted digitally between your project management platform and your accounting or payment automation systems. If your project managers are still walking invoices over to someone’s desk or forwarding emails to finance@yourcompany.com, it’s a recipe for frustration between teams.

By using a project management platform that integrates with your accounting tools, contract and cost data are entered once and synced across systems. This eliminates duplicative data entry while also providing a new level of transparency and seamless workflow between departments.

#4: Is our data safe and well-organized?

The cornerstone to a robust CRE project management and procurement process is an easily accessible, central location to disseminate documents and track relevant conversations. Here’s why:

  • Using one repository helps guard against multiple versions of the same document being generated unintentionally.
  • A tool that integrates email communication also functions as a system of record that the whole team can mine for important information.
  • If a project manager leaves, the vendor contact information, pricing data, and project history he accrued do not leave with him.

If there is no centralized repository for data, team members must transfer needed information on an individual basis. This is very time-consuming, starting with the task of finding the person who has the data you need. Your team may end up needlessly regenerating documents and spreadsheets rather than go to the trouble of finding it within the company.

#5: Are we empowering our team to make the most informed decisions?

To uncover meaningful intelligence on projects, especially at the portfolio level, lots of data points need to be compiled and aggregated. Spreadsheets strip data of its power by isolating it into digital silos; rushed emails requesting data from project teams lead to rushed responses in return.

Accurate forecasting requires data from a variety of sources and across financial periods. At some point, this information needs to be gathered from the various sources where it lives and aggregated in a way that is easy to evaluate. How many hours or days does your team usually spend on this?

In order to quickly generate reports or access specific information, consider a project management platform as the central repository for your data. A CRE project management platform that acts as your system of record, like Honest Buildings, will help you make better decisions, faster.

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