Not all BI solutions are created equal: what to consider for CRE
Choosing the right—or wrong—business intelligence (BI) solution can have major financial and operational ramifications for corporate real estate (CRE) professionals. Being able to extract and analyze data effectively is imperative to answering key questions that inform decision-making and streamline operations.
- Am I paying over market rate?
- Are my service levels impacting employee retention and performance?
- Am I using space optimally?
- Do I have equipment that might fail?
- Are my leasing events covered?
Not all BI solutions are created equal. Many CRE professionals are using multiple real estate planning and management applications that generate fragmented data, which requires a lot of manual labor to effectively use. By the time it has been extracted, integrated, and analyzed, it may already be out of date.
CRE organizations have long sought a BI solution that can fully integrate their data into one platform, where they can quickly and easily get a complete picture across all key areas:
- Portfolio optimization
- Space and workplace
- Operations
- Facilities management
When choosing a BI platform for your CRE needs, there are six important factors to consider.
In-depth CRE experience combined with technical expertise
While there are many BI technology options on the market that work moderately well for a variety of sectors and applications, BI companies don’t have deep (or sometimes any) CRE experience. Our industry has specific data requirements, and a BI solution needs to meet them. A platform that combines CRE and technical expertise magnifies the impact of your data by revealing the right metrics at the right time.
Easy integration
Choose a vendor- and competitor-agnostic solution. An open architecture allows you to consume data from any CRE application, regardless of other service providers you’re currently using.
Openness and flexibility
Don’t get locked in to using one vendor that may not meet your specific data and insights needs. The best CRE BI solution provider offers flexibility and doesn’t require you to use all their services, technologies, or subscriptions.
Real-time access to data
A cloud-based CRE BI solution that continually refreshes gives you easy, nearly real-time, secure access to all your real estate data in one place. It should also offer interoperability with the most common real estate applications—including integrated workplace management, space planning, facilities management, projects, and ERP systems.
Market benchmarking
Comprehensive industry benchmarking data, such as prevailing lease and service provider rates, is crucial to understanding your position in the market. A solution that offers proprietary market data paints the most complete picture of your portfolio, assets, and facilities management.
Actionable insights
A CRE BI solution should offer actionable insights that enhance and accelerate your decision-making, allowing you to better optimize your CRE portfolio and costs, enhance worker experiences, and manage risk and compliance more efficiently.
A smart CRE BI solution helps you understand what happened, why it matters, and what you can do to improve performance and operations.
Don’t settle for off-the-shelf BI options that can’t deliver what you need. See what Azara, the world’s first purpose-built CRE BI platform, can do for you.