What Drives Clients to PeopleSoft Real Estate Management (REM)

September 1, 2009
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We’ve talked about PeopleSoft Real Estate Management (REM) before, but I want to take a moment to highlight an example of two common pains that many companies endure before realizing they need a full REM solution. Like everything else, this is an exercise in tipping points: your tools work well enough until one day, frustration and complexity and lack of functionality gain critical mass and you begin searching for something better.

Let me be clear: Microsoft Excel – what most companies use until they realize they have created a bit of an XLS monster – is a great tool, but it quickly crumbles under its own weight when its forced to keep track of buildings, valuations, depreciation and lease renewals across lots of physical locations.

Below is an illustration of only two pain points that I see very frequently with clients who are looking to graduate to a full REM solution.

Help Manage Complexity

For a moment, let’s assume you are a retailer with 1,000 physical, leased locations to manage. We know Excel is a standard at many companies to track Accounts Payable (AP) transactions. That’s fine and well, but under our lease scenario, keeping track of lease renewals (and the overall process for doing so) is almost impossible using Excel. Typically, customers need at least six months to begin the lease renegotiation process comfortably, and if they wait too long, they lose massive leverage, which in turn quickly translates to too much money spent. With a system like PeopleSoft REM, you can set up multiple alerts for each of your 1,000 locations to help kick off the lease renegotiation process. This may seem like a minor thing until you calculate what 1,000 poorly-negotiated new leases would cost you over the length of whatever terms bind your agreements. You’re quickly talking real money in a very serious way.

Reporting

This is self-evident to some degree, but massively useful when it comes to managing 1,000 locations and looking at those assets in terms of the data that’s important to you. Excel has no built-in reporting, let alone out-of-box reporting that gives you insight into real estate-specific operations or KPIs. Managing 1,000 locations via manual Excel reports would be nothing short of a nightmare, and it has no built-in real estate contexts, so building them in the first place would be difficult to all but the seasoned Excel/real estate expert. This problem is obviously circumvented by a REM system such as PeopleSoft’s, as reporting is built-in and natively understands many REM operations. This seems like a luxury until you see everything PeopleSoft REM can do, when you suddenly ask yourself how you’ve been able to limp along without it.

You might say, “Yeah, so what?” to both of these until you realize the absolute weight of performing these tasks manually with a tool ill-prepared for the job. In my client engagements, when I illustrate the benefits of an REM system from these standpoints, people truly get excited. Why? Because they realize how much internal/staff bandwidth they can free up for other projects while letting an intelligent REM system pull the levers behind the curtain with no babysitting.

It’s a very, very powerful thing. Remember, with enterprise tech, the gods often live in the details.

If any of this sounds like something you’re wrestling with, please email me (seriously!) or give us a call at 800-774-5187. I’d love to help you sort your plans out.

Previously:

Quantifying the Value of Integration With PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: A Real Life Example
Quick Look: PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) 9.1 Enhancements
PeopleSoft ‘Edge of the Enterprise’ Applications: eSupplier Connection & eSettlements
PeopleSoft Financials: Source-to-Settle 9.1 Enhancements
PeopleSoft IT Asset Management: A Deeper Look
PeopleSoft Maintenance Management: A Deeper Look
PeopleSoft Real Estate Management: A Deeper Look
An Introduction to PeopleSoft Asset Lifecycle Management
Sneak Peek: PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal 9.1
PeopleTools 8.5: A Look Inside