It always amazes me how little importance some software buyers place on reporting options. The fact is, while some IWMS applications have great industry specific functionality or better project management or CAFM or lease administration; the ultimate reason to establish a single source of location data it to enable effective decision-making. And effective decision-making can only come through thoughtful review of summarized data (i.e. reporting). While dashboards can help drive some decision making as can specific analysis functionality, reports are still the most widely used deliverable of any IWMS system.

Also interesting is how many business users seems so willing to forfeit their right to quickly create queries and reports on their own, instead giving over this function to IT personnel specifically hired (at high salaries) as report writers. I believe the reasons for this are simply a history of “enterprise” report writers in large firms and a lack of knowledge of the reporting options available in IWMS applications.

IWMS applications vary widely in their reporting capabilities and many have only one option that adds a substantial cost to the annual total cost of ownership (TCO).

With this in mind I will discuss the different types of reporting and what prospective IWMS users should look for in their IWMS applications.

In general there are three types of reporting, dashboard objects which are really mini interactive reports, ad-hoc reports and enterprise reports. Now a reporting expert will probably call this a gross generalization but for business end users this is really what should matter to you.

Dashboard Objects

Unlike other forms of reporting, IWMS software reviewers do typically place a sufficient amount of importance on dashboards. Though many folks don’t consider Dashboard Objects reports, in truth they are small interactive reports with 5 or 6 columns typically with one grouping variables and a way to re-filter the report using options on that grouping variable. For example, a dashboard object may contain a list of lease options coming due in the next 30 days allow the user to click on a field to drill down to the specifics on the actions needed to execute the option. The object might even have a drop down box allowing the user to change the number of days into the future to show these lease options.

You will find some form of dashboard in every IWMS application with varying degrees of functionality. The difference in vendors comes in:

• The number of pre-built objects available
• The functional areas covered by those pre-built objects
• The expertise of the IWMS vendor to create meaningful pre-built objects
• Drill down capability on each object – note, systems that use an external providers dashboard will not have the same degree of drill down capability into the core application as a provider who has built their own dashboard into their own code. See Single vs. Multi-platform IWMS and why you should care
• Security control over those objects
• The ability of the client to create their own dashboard objects
• The complexity of the process to create a new object (by the end user or an IT user)
• The performance or response time of the dashboard – keep in mind when you launch a dashboard you are actually tasking the system to generate a bunch of reports across a large database. Poorly architected systems may take a long time to “paint” the screen.
• The ability to re-sort tabular dashboard objects with one click and no screen or object refresh – this one items will tell you a great deal about the quality of the system architecture. If a re-sort requires a page or an object refresh there is a performance issue being hidden

Once implementation of an IWMS application is completed, experience tells us that most users will spend most of their time on the dashboard. It is the first thing you see and, in a well architected and designed system, brings each users required tasks and issues to the forefront so that work can be done in priority order with ease. Make sure to consider this use case when selecting an IWMS application.

Ad-hoc reporting

The next most used reporting feature is ad-hoc reporting. The funny thing is many IWMS applications do not actually have a true business user capable ad-hoc reporting tool. Instead, most IWMS applications take the easy road and partner with a third-party reporting company and rely completely on canned reports or on complex ad-hoc reporting tools that require an IT report writer to create reports. This means business users are beholden to IT (and the often long waiting periods after request) to get even the simplest report created. It also requires the purchaser of the IWMS to lay out an additional $25,000 to $75,000 up-front plus annual maintenance for the right to report against their IWMS database.

Ad-hoc reporting should be just that, ad-hoc; meaning any business user should be able to, upon coming up with an idea for a report, create a report within a few minutes and get a result. And they should be able to do it without understanding what an outer-join is or a foreign key relationship. There will always be some reports that are too complex and require a professional report writer, but this should be the exception, not the norm.

When getting a demo of an IWMS ask the vendor to build a simple report right in front of you to find out if there is a true ad-hoc report capability and if its truly business user friendly. Can the report be saved and kept private or shared with others? Can the report be scheduled and automatically sent out? Also ask if those reports can be emailed to a distribution list or printed, or saved as PDF, or dumped into Excel. Business users should control reporting not IT so ASK!

Enterprise Reporting

As mentioned above, there will always be some reports that are too complex for any ad-hoc tool or that require data from multiple systems including the IWMS application and other databases within the client network. Ad-hoc reporting tools also cannot typically produce detailed and often very user specific formatting requests. In these cases Enterprise reporting is required.

There is a huge divergence in IWMS vendors on Enterprise reporting that breaks down into two camps.

Mandated Third-party reporting software

Many IWMS applications, particularly those created from a bunch of different applications gotten through multiple acquisitions of other software firms. Using a mandated third party applications is required in this case as the vendor needs it to knit together all the different databases that are a typical by-product of the multi-platform IWMS application.

The benefit of this option is the vendor has likely pre-configured the data into manner making it easier to report on. This will make implementation of the reporting tool simpler and thus reduce some professional services cost at implementation (that might have been spent on organizing the data for reporting). There still will be a PS cost in creating the clients specific reports since it is unlikely the client has an IT resource that knows the required third party tool.

The biggest problem with this option is the purchaser is required to pay a rather large fee up front and then annually to use this third party reporting tool. A tool that they likely don’ t have hardware or IT resources to support. This means a very high TCO when you analyze the cost of the licenses, maintenance, hardware and IT staffing.

Even if a company has already invested in an Enterprise reporting tool, many IWMS vendors offer one option for third-party reporting and if you are not already using that third-party product you have no choice but to bring in yet another reporting solution.

Vendor Agnostic Third-party reporting

In short, what this means is the IWMS vendor allows for reporting by most if not all third party reporting solutions. There are two common methods used for this type of reporting, data marts and web services.

Data marts There is a base standard most third-party enterprise reporting vendors use for how they access data called ODBC or JDBC. What this means is any data provided in a manner that can be accessed using ODBC or JDBC can be reported on.

So, some IWMS vendors will provide new clients with a data mart, which is a small database designed specifically for reporting against. The vendor should then also provide a pre-built process for updating that data-mart on some short time period (often nightly). This then allows the client organization to leverage their existing enterprise reporting investment to create Enterprise reports against their IWMS system. They don’t have to buy any additional software licenses nor hire more IT staff to write reports using a new reporting tool.

Clients do have to provide a database instance to store the data mart in-house and enough bandwidth at off-peak hours to update it. There will likely be some up-front cost in making sure the data mart has all data clients may add during an implementation and in making sure the data exchange for updating the data mart works in a secure fashion though any cost here will be far less than the cost of buying a new third-party reporting tool.

Web services
Another method more advanced IWMS vendors may provide is web-services access to data for reporting. What this means is the vendor has pre-built little programs that are created for the sole purpose of securely passing data out of the system to a requesting system. The big advantages here are that this method is self updating and does not require much upfront PS work to get it going. It also

The downside is that many customers simply don’t have the IT know how to do it.

Using this means the customer IT staff would create a report using what ever third party tool they already have and then write web services (if the third party tool does not already have them) to ask for the data the report requires. The request is sent to the IWMS vendor application, which has web services to receive the request and respond with the data required for the report.

I could go on all day about reporting but as this is my longest blog ever I applaud anyone who got this far and thank you for getting here!

Shameless Plug

Lx IWMS offers business user friendly ad-hoc reporting and Enterprise reporting through a delivered data mart and web services allowing clients to leverage their existing Enterprise reporting investments without any additional software cost. Lx IWMS also provides a user definable set of dashboards including dozens of pre-configured user specific dashboard objects. And, in late 2010, we will add the option of an optional Enterprise reporting tool called BIRT; an open source (aka FREE) reporting application that will allow clients without existing enterprise reporting to build and utilize advanced Enterprise reports with NO additional software cost.

Previous IWMS related Blogs

What is IWMS anyway?
IWMS? It’s Location! Location! Location!
The Power of Location Management
IWMS – Why so expensive?
IWMS in the “Cloud”
How Capital Project Management fits in an IWMS

There are many vendors of real estate software to choose from today. There are vendors that provide individual solutions for mapping and GIS technology, modeling technology, transaction management, site selection and project management technology and there are several vendors that provide individual applications for facility management and maintenance technology. Firms possessing multiple locations can choose to buy one application at a time selecting the “best of breed” to meet each major set of requirements. For example, it is very common for the construction department of multi-location firms to buy a construction project management system purely to meet that very specific need while the real estate department might choose a lease administration solution and a mapping solution and the facilities group selects capital projects and facilities maintenance applications. The groups buy based on a singularly focused set of requirements pay a fair price and implement their technology.

While “best of breed” buying may seem like a great solution, as time passes four common problems appear.

First common problem: When executives or IT (or both) decide the applications need to be integrated to avoid duplication of data and manual data entry and reentry; since each system likely has an address for each location, the company may have multiple systems of record for the same locations causing confusion and a lack of faith in all systems. And the location is just the beginning of the problem. As these systems are all involved in many common processes related to budgets and schedules, a great deal of data has to be managed across cross-functional workflows that span multiple “best of breed” systems. Integration then requires involvement of multiple vendors who, very often, don’t want the other to see their applications.

To make matters worse some of these applications may be Web-based and hosted outside of the company firewall while others may be internal browser based solutions or client/server applications. Managing multiple integrations to multiple systems, in multiple programming languages across multiple platforms suddenly becomes a spider web of complexity costing much time and money and often ending in failure.

Results: much higher cost, disparate data, multiple systems of record, loss of true real-time data, much longer time to achieve benefits of location performance management and a whole lot of finger pointing between multiple vendors and no one to hold accountable.

Second common problem: Getting staff to use the system and use it effectively. None of these systems benefit the company if they are not used or, worse, if they are used incorrectly. As many staff members and vendors may actually be involved in processes across different areas of your company, they will be asked to use multiple systems (often with different names and addresses for the same locations!). By having multiple applications from different vendors you now have multiple different user interfaces with different navigation, terminology, look and feel and overall use philosophy. As a lifelong designer and architect of software and user interfaces I can tell you no two of us thinks exactly alike (unless you work for MSFT and have no choice).

Users have to go to multiple trainings to learn multiple new systems; and you know how much real estate, construction and facilities folks LOVE to learn new technology!

Results: Having multiple “best of breed” products may result in poor uptake of the system across the enterprise and, in some cases, even when it is used it is not used well providing “dirty” data that may be used to make critical decisions. Training is constant and every change of staff requires months of training on multiple systems.

Ok, so let’s say you get passed the two problems above and now you want to integrate your “best of breed” system into the overall company financial system, often SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, JD Edwards, Great Plains, Lawson, etc… It took you three years to get your “best of breed” solutions integrated to each other and the vendors have stopped blaming each other and are now instead all taking 100% of the credit.

Third common problem: You begin the ERP integration only to realize that you will have to build multiple redundant and sometime chained (multi-step integrations involving many applications in a particular order to complete a single process) integrations.

Tracking the total cost of a location development and then maintenance over time to be able to compare to revenue and come up with a real calculation of the value the location is producing requires data from all of your vendors’ systems at different times. The same goes for tracking where and how location revenues are impacted by capital projects or new development or remodels or even dispositions. All of these everyday processes involve different “best of breed” systems at different times in the lifecycle. So, to integrate to an ERP or any other system you will need to expend much investment, much time and, again, endure finger pointing across multiple vendors as to who caused the delay in one of the 50 integration points due to a missed email.

Result: even more cost, more confusion, more finger pointing and years of project management to try and know how much your locations really cost and how long they take to become optimal.

Fourth common problem: The worst problem with combining “best of breed” solutions happens when one or all of the above problems causes a failure in implementation of some or all technology attempted; it is a loss of faith in real estate technology.
Now I am someone who has made my life all about making real estate technology so you would say “of course that is what he thinks is the worst problem”. But, it really is the biggest problem for all as a loss of faith in real estate technology often results in many years of negative feelings about trying a new technology and provides the change-averse crowd with the ideal rebuttal for anyone suggesting a new system investment – “we tried that already and it cost us millions and set us back years; why try it again?” That’s a hard argument to overcome.

Result: years of your competitors gaining or surpassing you as the bitterness from past real estate technology failures weigh on the organizations ability to do it right.

Now here is the part where I tell you how IWMS solutions solve all these problems easily – except that is not true either. While all vendors talk about having the ONE solution to manage all of your location related processes, none of us have one solution that fits everyone. And some IWMS vendors also don’t really have ONE solution anyway; they have a bunch of solutions they bought or licensed from others that they deliver as “one” solution but in reality is simply a “best of breed” solution (that may not actual be best at everything) from a single vendor. In some cases these disparate solutions are tied together by common reporting, dashboard or work flow solutions (also from other vendors) but, under the covers, are actually multiple databases and platforms with multiple programming languages in use across multiple business logic tiers. While this does avoid some of the finger pointing issue, it does not solve the other problems.

There are two key lessons to take away from this Blog:
1. “Best of Breed” application selection may seem cheaper and easier in the short term but it almost always costs far more and diminishes the competitive advantage of your real estate technology over time.
2. Even the “fully integrated”, “single source of truth” IWMS solutions are not always really one solution from one vendor!

As always ASK QUESTIONS of your IWMS like:
1. How many databases does your IWMS use?
2. Does it require multiple web servers?
3. Is it JAVA, .NET, VB or all of the above?
4. How many different code bases are involved?
5. How many development teams do you have and how do you separate their duties?
6. How many other companies and solutions are part of your IWMS solution?

Shameless Plug

Lx IWMS Location Performance Management solution is a single solution, from a single vendor, using a single code base and database. We developed all of our own code and, with the exception of our recent partnership with Buxton, deliver 100% of our solution on our servers, using our code that we created and manage. Integration across the lifecycle is built-in since the entire application was developed on the same code base by the same development team since May of 2000. Integrating to ERP’s is something we do on nearly every project and, in fact, have created a built-in (same code base and database) solution for web-based and local data integration using flat files or web services called the Lx Messenger. Even clients can use this utility that comes with Lx IWMS to build real-time or scheduled integrations to any other system.

With that said, we, like all other vendors, don’t do everything better than everyone else (but don’t tell our Board of Directors that). A customer at now defunct Circuit City in 2004 said something to me that stuck – he said (I am paraphrasing as it was along time ago and I may not remember the exact words) they selected us because we got an A, A- or B+ in every category they required.

Even though there were “best of breed” solutions that were “A’s” or “A+’s” in some areas, he realized that those slight differences in features did not come close to overcoming the value of buying one solution from one vendor that did everything.

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Previous IWMS related Blogs

What is IWMS anyway?
IWMS? It’s Location! Location! Location!
The Power of Location Management
IWMS – Why so expensive?

Real estate organizations have been using lease administration systems for years. What started out as a replacement for clunky, file-based records that were often misplaced and decentralized, modern lease administration systems have turned into centralized, decision-support databases that are critical to maximizing ROI of real estate assets. When these systems first appeared, simply having all of the key leased and owned data in one place and sharable across the organization was the primary goal.

I recall back in 1983, I worked as a consultant for XEROX, developing an in-house database to track the details on their 1,000 owned properties and approximately 2,500 leases. XEROX had just come out with a “rigid disk” option for their line of personal computers. Having a whopping 10MB of storage, it became feasible to create a database capable of storing all of the information in one centralized place. The system I designed, referred internally as LeaseAd, was written in Dbase II, stored over 900 unique attributes about each location and ultimately became the first commercial Lease Administration software available.

Today, lease administration software remains a valuable and effective tool for any real estate organization with a sizable portfolio. But, as is this case with all technology, the original conception of this software has changed many times over. Older systems are outdated and no longer as relevant as they once were. If you are a company using an older lease administration system, it is time to take a step back, look at what you have and determine if it is truly meeting your overall real estate goals and objectives and providing an efficient platform to execute your real estate strategy. There several reasons why this may not be the case.

Technology that was purchased and installed 10 or more years ago is now outdated and, in many cases unsupported. What happens if the software breaks? Who is going to fix it? And does it truly matter since the software is probably no longer compatible with current operating systems and browsers?

Integration is also an important factor. Current lease administration systems offer an integrated suite of products that can add infinitely more benefit and value to a real estate portfolio than its lease administration predecessor. What would have been several individual real estate tools years ago is now integrated into a suite of products that provide cross-portfolio analysis and reporting to give the 2010 versions of lease administration a significant advantage over older versions.

Another benefit to upgrading lease administration software is that today’s products are entirely Web-based and/or available as an on-line service. This is important because Web-based products mean less IT investment and typically better data security. It also means inclusion of features that old client server applications could not offer like integrated lease analysis and comparison, providing access from anywhere, along with real-time alerts and notifications, real-time data updating, true data transparency, access via mobile devices and integration into other modern Web-based applications like IWMS.

Working with a single vendor is another benefit of today’s lease administration software system. Why not work with one vendor who can supply all products you need rather than a host of different vendors? Support from a single vendor eliminates finger-pointing and holds them accountable. Finally, there are new laws and industry standards that did not exist years ago, that were put in place to hold software companies accountable for the performance of their products. These standards for data and programming help obtain interoperability and standard look and feel across multiple applications.

All of these benefits, from being able to service the software to compatibility, integration, web-based access, working with a single vendor and the enactment of new standards and procedures make the benefits of upgrading lease administration software a no-brainer. It is almost impossible to make the case that older versions of the software are just as effective and useful in today’s marketplace.

Shameless Plug
At Lucernex Technologies, we have just launched our newest version of lease administration software – Lx Contracts – which is the most technologically advanced, lease administration, rent accounting and real estate contract management software available in the market today with fully integrated Lease Analysis and Comparison. I’ve learned a few things since I created LeaseAd back in the 1980s and SLIM in the 1990s, along with over 600 implementations. Lx Contracts starts where these systems left off and provides a platform that will be meeting your needs for many years to come.

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Previous Blogs by Ken Brown

Optimizing and Globalizing Real Estate?

DALLAS, TEXAS, (March 22, 2010) — Lucernex Technologies, an innovative developer of business intelligence software for real estate management and development, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with Buxton®, the industry leader in customer analytics. This new partnership will provide clients of Lucernex and Buxton® with a wider array of software solutions that both manage the real estate lifecycle process and provide detailed financial models for customer behavior.

“We are pleased to announce this partnership that will mutually benefit Lucernex and Buxton clients by providing a web-based real estate software solution with integrated GIS, mapping and customer analytics from the best prediction modeling company in the business,” said Joe Valeri, president of Lucernex Technologies. “Thanks to this new alliance, real estate professionals will be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive, effective solution than the one we are offering.”

This new partnership with Buxton®, combined with the recent acquisition of LseMod, has enabled Lucernex to achieve its long-term strategic goal of offering its clients products that provide site by site return-on-investment indicators so they may make the best possible site, location and lease decisions. The alliance also extends Buxton’s real estate modeling capabilities to any of Lucernex Technologies’ clients who are seeking new business opportunities for existing products and services.

“Partnering with Lucernex allows Buxton to offer its clients software solutions to better manage the real estate development lifecycle,” said Charles Wetzel, president and chief operation officer of Buxton. “This unique software tool addresses real estate development and location management from the top down which is something we’re pleased to be able to offer our client base.”

About Lucernex
Founded in 2000, Lucernex Technologies provides real estate developers and facility managers with powerful software tools to guide them through the real estate development process. For nearly a decade, Fortune 500 companies in the commercial real estate, hospitality, retail, construction and engineering industries, both in the United States and Europe, have been utilizing Lucernex Technologies software solutions every day to better manage the development lifecycle. As an innovative leader in Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) solutions, Lucernex continues to grow its customer base by applying its Web-based software expertise and real estate development insight to provide advanced tools and services for business. For more information, please visit www.Lucernex.com

About Buxton
Since 1994, Buxton® has been the industry leader in customer analytics for the retail industry. Its focus now includes healthcare organizations, consumer packaged goods manufacturers and city governments. Buxton® draws from its individual- and household-level data to determine lifestyles and buying habits to clearly identify an organization’s best customers and find more like them anywhere in the U.S. Among its 1,900 clients are retailers Weight Watchers, New Balance Shoes, Sally Beauty Supply and West Marine.

For more information, visit www.Buxtonco.com

Media Contact:
Lindsay Hebert
Devaney & Associates
410-296-0800
lhebert@devaney.net

# # #

Shameless Plug

Lx LseMod Corporate Lease Analysis is the market leading application for Corporate lease analysis, providing GAAP impact analysis within detailed P&L and Cash Flow projections. Companies like GE, MetLife, American Express and Robert Half use Lx LseMod Corporate for lease analysis making it the most trusted name in corporate lease analysis.

Reasons some vendors IWMS Software can get expensive

There are actually several answers to this question depending on the vendor you are looking at. I don’t believe it is appropriate to mention other vendors in a negative light so I will simply characterize them into groups and potential buyers will need to ask the right questions to ascertain where we all fit. Several vendors, particularly the really expensive ones, fit into many of these categories.

Huge Infrastructure

This is the most obvious one. Some vendors have grown rather bloated with staff. There are good reasons for this (lots of customer service or new product development) and bad reasons for this, which may provide evidence of potential problems including:

• huge Professional Services staffs – which may indicate a heavy implementation and long term services cost
• large product management and maintenance development staff – usually indicates there are many legacy products to maintain due to the companies move across different platforms as they matured. This is a problem as it typically restrains their development progress on their IWMS as they struggle to maintain many old products
• large development staffs in professional services – might indicate a likelihood of heavy customization needs

Many OEM licenses to pay for

Most vendors have chosen the “easy” way out when needing to add core components like reporting, workflow or dashboards by partnering with another software vendor to include that partner’s product within their solution. In doing so the IWMS vendor promises a specific dollar amount per sale or a percentage of each sale back to the partner vendor. This DOES often give them excellent functionality in that area but it comes with a cost per sale, a cost to maintain over time and adds another layer of complexity to managing the application over time for both the IWMS vendor and the customer. Note, I am not knocking this model. While Lucernex has decided not to use OEM partnerships to this point (with one minor exception) so that we can keep our prices low, this method does provide a short cut to really good functionality for some vendors; however it does add to their cost.

Heavy VC / Private Equity Firm involvement

Venture Capital and Private Equity Firms are in business to make money. They do so by gambling on a group of companies they invest in or purchase with the hope that a few of those companies succeed and repay their investment in all of the companies (including the failures) plus a hefty profit. To get these returns they of course will drive their companies (from their seats on the companies board) to increase profits to increase the companies’ value for an eventual exit (typically a sale to larger firm). Once again, I don’t knock this model, some companies have to do this to stay alive and others want to do it to accelerate their growth. As a result, however, prices have to be higher to meet these loftier profit objectives.

Many mergers to pay for

All software markets consolidate as they grow and the IWMS market is no exception. If you look back through press releases you will see several of the large vendors have been formed through multiple mergers and acquisitions. This is done to strengthen their offering and widen their customer base. Lucernex did this recently with our acquisition of Lease Cost Solutions (LseMod). Acquisitions come with a cost and an expected return on investment, which has to be factored into the products pricing (especially if you are backed by venture capitalists).

Requires extensive implementation services

This is typically the cost that is best hidden by the more expensive vendors. Proposals typically provide very vague pricing for implementation and require a discovery session to come to a real price. This is a valid need as it is impossible to provide a defensible price without knowing what the customer really wants. However, in most cases, the implementation (short and long term) cost far exceeds the software price! Customers can easily get fooled by a price, commit to a vendor and then find out the implementation cost is 2, 3 or even 4 times the cost of the software. This is especially true with vendors who are not Location Centric and have to customize or heavily configure to meet unique customer needs.

For those of you shopping for an IWMS ask these two simple questions to get a real idea of what implementation services will cost:

1. Do you offer any fixed priced implementations? If the vendor does and is willing to give you details, even if it does not fit your exact needs, it will give you a very good idea of what you will get for your money.
2. What is the typical ratio of services to software cost? For example in Lucernex’s case we are typically 1 to 1, meaning our services cost is typically equal to the software cost (and that’s not due to an expensive product cost either!). Having worked for or with several of the pricier vendors I can tell you their real cost of implementation is typically 2 to 4 times software cost.

The more location based a product is and the more user interface driven the environment configuration tools are, the cheaper the implementation should be.

Total cost of ownership (TCO)

Many IWMS buyers, when going for internal approval, concern themselves only with the upfront cost and the annual fee. While those are obviously critical, depending on the product, the long term cost of ownership may be much higher than these obvious fees if the vendor application requires customization or fails to provide easy to use client system administration tools. The more tools provided to the client to make normal changes easy for forms, pages, workflows, terminology, users and even system navigation, the lower the long term cost of ownership will be.

These are a few obvious reasons for the somewhat large price differences between the IWMS vendors. As usual, this is from my perspective as a low cost provider who has largely avoided the above pitfalls. I am sure the high priced IWMS vendors would argue that each of the above issues has actually made them a better product or a better company and they may be right! I am simply trying to provide some insight into why the differences exist.

BEWARE

Over the past few years we have competed for business across the country and have witnessed an interesting tactic that often occurs when we compete against the high priced vendors. They will present their price and then learn that a lower priced vendor like Lucernex is a finalist. They will then dramatically drop their price often to the point where they are breaking even or losing money. They do this to gain market share and try to starve the smaller vendors of revenue. It typically does not work as most customers see through it. However, some customers will go for it thinking they got a “deal”. What they get however is a vendor who will find every possible way to add change orders or to cut back their project, as they know they can’t make money on the deal any other way, and, once live, will not provide good customer service to a customer they are not making any money on.

Shameless plug

Lucernex Lx IWMS and Lx LseMod applications are very affordable and designed for low up front cost and low TCO. Our implementation projects are not only lower cost than most vendors, they include a complete training program to ensure clients can maintain and change their environment long after implementation ends to keep TCO low.

Previous IWMS related Blogs

What is IWMS anyway?
IWMS? It’s Location! Location! Location!
The Power of Location Management

Recently I had very good conversation with an old brokerage buddy in California, Jack. He was really freaking out that his real estate career was heading in directions he was not prepared for. See he’s been a “Tenant Rep” for 20 plus years and now is competing for Landlord Rep and Sublease deals just to make ends meet!

Tenant deals are few and far between in his market. He’s finding himself reinventing his game almost daily. All part of this economy I said, I hear this happening over and over all over the place. I told him to relax it’s all very relative to each other and he’ll be fine. After all he survived the dot bomb and more in years past. Of course he also has the best tools in the trade to make him the expert I talk so much about as well. Now I’m not saying Tenant Rep is the way of the past but it’s just one of the many expert options you must now offer your potential clients in order to secure new business.

This economy is driving more Tenant Rep agents to start looking and working for Landlords and doing more sales. You can’t be as selective as you once were in your real estate careers in this type of market. Even large Commercial Real Estate houses are branching out from just being Tenant Rep houses to being full service type houses. They are bringing on more agents to handle Industrial, Retail and more deals.

I suspect more mergers and acquisitions are coming forth within the commercial real estate house markets too. Just as we are seeing portfolio’s being snatched up almost weekly. I’m even seeing more international money filtering in as owners of larger Class A buildings in this country are trying to dig out financially. I do suspect that “Sale Leasebacks” are going to really be the BIG buzz word this year. There will also continue to be upticks in the vacancy ratios for Office, Industrial and Retail –personally I think more companies are looking at larger spaces now to take advantage of such low leasing rates. Therefore the balance of ratios will continue.

So yes we have all become a Jack of all trades in this economy. I believe you should prepare yourself like you would for an earthquake or other natural disaster. Get your arsenal ready for whatever business comes your way, BE PREPARED. Having the tools and resources at hand will make your life easier, your business grow and your wallet fatter.

Shameless Plug

Lx LseMod applications include lease analysis products for Tenant Rep, Industrial, Retail, Lease vs Buy, Sublease and Landlord which provide detailed reports and scenario analysis that help you Win More Business!

Lx LseMod Corporate applications provide detailed GAAP/SOX impact analysis and complete Sale Leaseback analysis with flexible reporting to meet any clients needs.

In the last Blog I talked about the importance of an IWMS using the Location as the central organization point for all data.

By centering on the Location you can:

• Track all entities within your Portfolio or aggregate information to track your entire Portfolio
• Track all Center information including Leases
• Track all Facilities and equipment on a Campus
• Track each tax Parcel within the Location
• Track multiple planned Locations by market in multiple Programs
• Manage all collected data for multiple Sites of interest for every planned Location
• Manage as many Construction Projects as you want on one or more tax Parcels of the same or different Prototypes
• Maintain as many Facilities as you would like across one or more Programs
• Track all Spaces in each Facility, how they are used and the associated Leases.
• Run as many Capital Projects as you need
• Administer multiple Leases and subleases on a group of Facilities or on individual Facilities
• Track all real estate related Contracts for Equipment, Land, Services, etc….
• Maintain as many Franchisees information as required in the same or across multiple Facilities
• Track all Lease income and expenses on any Facilities or Location

What makes Location Centric Management most powerful is the infinite combinations of business arrangements it can handle. A few examples:

Example1:
Let’s say you company is a Convenience Store Retailer but also a real estate developer. You buy land that crosses two jurisdictions in an emerging market, put in one of your stores but also develop the surrounding property with a strip center, a hotel and two small office buildings.

• One location, multiple tax parcels, three facilities, one owned store created from a construction project, one center (also a facility) with multiple leases, two facilities for office building with multiple spaces and leases including some spaces with multiple leases. You used one of your prototypes to develop your store and it exists within your Rural Market Program. You can now launch capital projects across your entire Rural Market Program to automatically include this store. Every detail on each item discussed above can easily be viewed at the Location level with dashboard, alerts and reports to ensure a senior executive responsible for one or more locations or parts of a location (like Office buildings) can see everything related to the Location and drill down as needed.

Example 2:
Your company is a large insurance company with retail-like locations worldwide that provide a local office for clients to call and receive service from. You have three large headquarters, one of which you own that is a multi-facility campus, in 2 different countries plus 600 local offices that you manage the leases for.

• 603 locations. One location is a campus, built on 3 tax parcels across two jurisdictions. The campus has 4 facilities on it, one of which has one floor subleased to 6 different food vendors. Two locations have one building on them, each having one lease and multiple equipment contracts. 300 of the 600 local offices are simple leases with 5 year renewals. 200 of the others are in Asia Pacific and have 1 or 2 year renewals. The last 100 local offices were acquired in a takeover of a competitor and are now subleased.

While Location Centric Management can do all of that it also can manage simpler structures just as well without making it any more complex than a system that can handle only simple location structures.

The next obvious question is why wouldn’t a technology for real estate be location centric? The simple answer is that many vendors started out as point solutions targeting one area of the market then built up their solution to address the image of “IWMS” or customer needs. Think about how a house looks that began as a small colonial and then had multiple extensions put on, often hastily, to meet some immediate need. Is it going to look or function as well as the same size house designed up front to meet all the needs of its users? And how much time and money would it take to tear it all down and start over? It is much the same with IWMS technology, those vendors that started out looking at the entire lifecycle will be able to provide location centric applications, built on a single framework, that best address the end users needs without trying to wedge each users special needs in with customizations or elaborate configuration.

OK, now comes the part where I have to admit that, of course, this is my view as one of the visionaries (with Ken Brown) behind the Lx IWMS Location Performance Management software. Other vendors will argue that the Facility or Campus or Lease is the central entity. From their point of view I am sure that makes sense and many could likely write a more eloquent argument to make their case. What matters to someone choosing an IWMS solution is whether all the current or future business arrangements can be handled in any combination the customer can think of and, more importantly, is the application designed to handle those arrangements or will it need to be customized or heavily configured to meet those needs (which would indicate little flexibility to change and limitations on connections between the moving parts) or worse yet – is the technology vendor forcing you into managing your locations as they dictate, rather than leveraging the unique structure that has made you successful and is your competitive advantage. Also, what is the structure of the database? Is it one database and one code base or its it a complex interconnection of separately designed products and databases tied together with a front end concealing a lack of singular design vision. I will save the details of that discussion for another Blog!

Shameless plug

Lx IWMS was designed from the ground up as a 100% web-based location centric system with a single database accessed by a single front end programmed in a single code base by the same group of developers since 2000 when we were founded. Even our recent expansion of the suite to include complete lease and contract administration (led by SLIM Lease Administration designer Ken Brown) and Capital Project Management has been added directly into the original structure. We can handle any combination of uses of a location that any organization can dream up! See our IWMS competitor chart or give me a call to discuss how we match up to other IWMS vendors.

Joe’s Next Blog: “Why are some IWMS’s so expensive”, will be posted next week.

Previous IWMS related Blogs

What is IWMS anyway?
IWMS? It’s Location! Location! Location!

Upcoming Webinars

FREE WEBINAR: How to use Location Management Technology to quickly increase revenue and lower cost. Click here for more information

My last blog discussed the very loose definition of IWMS and how it tries to describe a wide array of very different vendors. In this blog I will discuss one type of IWMS, Location Management Software, and what the different end users may need to focus on when selecting a Location Management IWMS.

What are the three things that matter in real estate – Location, Location, Location. This old adage about real estate applies to commercial real estate technology as well. The location is what real estate is all about whether you are a 2000 store retailer, a 30 building corporation, a large hotel company or a multi-building campus – everything you do in relation to your real estate is based on a location. And, managing the performance of each location to perform optimally is the ultimate goal for each location whether it’s optimizing revenue or minimizing cost.

Each industry is going to have different methods to achieve these goals based on their business goals. A retailer may focus on same store revenue growth or new store development, a hotelier will focus on REVPAR growth while a corporate occupier (owner of leased) is likely to focus on space management, cost control per location (or employee) or implementation of technology to achieve savings.

The tools each of these different users needs is therefore as different as the decision makers selecting those tools. Not surprisingly, the different types of real estate portfolio owners have organized themselves differently to reflect both their differing business processes and the importance they place on the different areas of functionality.

A retailer or hotelier, for example, will have less need for a CAFM system and more need for demographics and sales prediction. Facilities management is important to this audience but real estate selection is the business driver and therefore the decision maker is typically a real estate executive when it comes to selecting technology or other tools.

A corporate real estate department will have far more use for CAFM and no need for sales prediction. While the real estate function is important, the decision for non-retail corporate companies will typically be driven by the Facilities Management group.

According to a 2009 IWMS Connect article, this difference across many organizations is starting to blur as these roles are beginning to converge into a more “workplace” driven function.

However no matter what type of user you are, all the data you collect, work flows you manage, reports you generate, schedules you manage, work orders you cut or demographics you run are all centered around a location. Shouldn’t the technology you choose to manage it center on the location as well?

By centering on the Location you can:

• Track all entities within your Portfolio or aggregate information to track your entire Portfolio
• Track all Center information including Leases
• Track all Facilities and equipment on a Campus
• Track each tax Parcel within the Location
• Track multiple planned Locations by market in multiple Programs
• Manage all collected data for multiple Sites of interest for every planned Location
• Manage as many Construction Projects as you want on one or more tax Parcels of the same or different Prototypes
• Maintain as many Facilities as you would like across one or more Programs
• Track all Spaces in each Facility, how they are used and the associated Leases.
• Run as many Capital Projects as you need
• Administer multiple Leases and subleases on a group of Facilities or on individual Facilities
• Track all real estate related Contracts for Equipment, Land, Services, etc….
• Maintain as many Franchisees information as required in the same or across multiple Facilities
• Track all Lease income and expenses on any Facilities or Location

Shameless plug