Small, Private Commercial Real Estate Firm – IT System Direction
The Challenge
A small, private owner and manager of $100M in commercial real estate was planning to double in size and the current IT infrastructure would not support the growth. The company’s accounting operations and reporting responsibilities were spread across multiple resources, both in-house and a third party. This division of duties was leading to a gap in timely accounting information. This information gap was also compounded with high turnover in the positions that completed the internal accounting duties.
The Client asked Teel StratVisor Group to complete an IT System Direction for the Accounting function that included system selection, resource recommendations and macro process improvement. The goal of this direction was to position the company for growth and to lower cost of operations.
What We Did
Teel StratVisor Group first asked the client to complete our on-line Strategic Owner’s Diagnostic. The purpose of the diagnostic is to help identify key areas within a company that are currently not as efficient as they could be when compared to industry Best Practices. Once the results were reviewed, the client determined that a System Direction project provided the greatest opportunity for improvement and asked StratVisor to kick off the project. The first step was to understand the company’s current state. This was done through one-on-one interviews (7 team members) and an in-depth analysis of client tools, processes and systems.
Once the current state was understood and documented, the StratVisor team developed a scorecard with several in-house and outsourced alternatives to the current accounting solution. The purpose of the scorecard was to objectively determine the optimal solution for the client’s accounting needs. The team identified key decision factors for each of the alternative solutions, and facilitated a weighting session with executive management to determine how important each factor was to the client. Based upon the Scorecard’s objective weighting, the best option for the Client was to outsource the accounting system and processing to a third party.
In addition to the System Direction, the StratVisor team identified 55 opportunities for improvement and made recommendations for each that would provide a significant, positive impact on the company with little cost and effort for the client. The StratVisor team also provided “quick hit” solutions to several recommendations including the creation of a work order process and tracking system and the development of a work request and tenant authorization templates. These solutions helped streamline the Client’s processes and minimized the time required to track and complete work orders.
The Result
As a result of working with the StratVisor team, the Client was able to recoup the cost of the project in less than one year, and received the following results/documentation:
- Consolidated owner diagnostic results that benchmarked the company against other owners and best practices recommendations on their top three improvement areas
- Objective third-party assessment of the following
- Operations
- Systems
- Current Processes
- Current state documentation including an Issues and Opportunities matrix with 8 categories, plus 55 initiatives and themes from interviews and current state analysis
- Prioritized initiatives with timeline, resource requirement and cost to understand degree of effort
- Objective scorecard with relevant decision factors
- Research of potential in-house and outsourced accounting options including cost information
- IT direction with an objective recommendation
- New work order process flow, request template, tenant authorization template and work order tracking document
- Clearly demonstrated cost saving methods of $180,000 per year
Timing: 8 weeks
