Is data transparency intangible in real estate project management? Many consider transparency to be immeasurable and therefore not valid in an ROI analysis.
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Lucernex expert Mike Nuzum (see Mike’s management summary here) provides this response:
During the time I was in the retail business we developed many ways to compress the time it took to complete critical project tasks; whether it was to get a store open faster, get leases signed faster or implement a multi-store remodel capital project quicker. (NSCB3GKUGAMP)
One process we developed enabled us to open new stores in just 3 days.
The key to hitting this rigorous deadline was to accurately predict what day we would obtain the certificate of occupancy (CO).
Once we confirmed the day we would obtain the CO we would schedule the store opening to follow this process:
- Obtain the CO on Monday of a given week,
- Fly an opening crew of up to 35 people to the store location Friday afternoon,
- On Friday evening the opening team would measure and mark the position of the fixtures on the floor,
- Saturday, 8:00 am, trucks with fixtures would arrive at the store loading dock,
- By 2 pm that same day the fixtures would be set,
- At that same time, 2:00 pm, trucks with merchandise would begin to arrive at 60 minute intervals,
- By late Saturday evening all the merchandise would be on display,
- Late Sunday morning the merchandise would be checked for pricing, the signs would go up and the cash registers would be set,
- Monday 9:00am – Grand Opening!
This process, when properly choreographed, allowed us to open a large retail store to 25,000sqft with 45,000 SKUs in just 3 days. Every step in the process needed to be exactly on time.
On occasion our simple MS Excel based tracking system would tell us we had obtained the CO and we actually had not. Our data was not transparent or real-time; instead it was direct entered data into an Excel spreadsheet with no automated relationships to other tasks or alerts. At some point in acquiring the site, someone entered a date for a CO that they believed would happen, however any prior scheduled event could impact it and without linked tasks, alerts and a transparent system a change in CO date could slip through the cracks.
The real problem was that we would not know that we did not have a CO until the opening crew and the carefully timed trucks arrived and we were unable to get into the building! This would result in a cost of $500,000 a day to keep everything in a holding pattern until the CO was finalized or even more if the CO could not be obtained quickly and we had to reschedule.
When opening many stores or managing many capital projects, it is not uncommon for internally developed systems to cause these types of mistakes. If we were using a professionally developed, real-time system we would have been able to see if an earlier event like the Fire Marshall not signing off on the sprinkler test or a missed or failed critical inspection had caused a delayed CO. Even if someone forgot to update the earlier tasks, the transparency of the system would have allowed us to see that updates were not being made so a problem might exist.
So, is transparency intangible, I think not; nothing is more important than being able to see the whole picture in one place and TRUST what you see.
The Lucernex IWMS provides a real-time environment to collaborate with everyone involved in each project. On a daily basis you receive information and alerts on issues that could affect the schedule. Using the scenario above, if any event caused slippage in the CO date, all impacted personnel would get an immediate alert. If earlier tasks were not being updated in a timely fashion, an alert would be escalated to management to check on the validity of the CO date shown in the system before resources were committed. Avoiding the cost of this event occurring even once would provide 100% ROI on the Lx IWMS.
There is a similar BLOG on how to sell IWMS/CAFM/CMMS solutions at: fm insight
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