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The Inland Real Estate Group of Companies, Inc

BACKGROUND
Based in Oak Brook, Illinois, the Inland Real Estate Group comprises four Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) that own and manage more than 1400 commercial properties with more than 110 million rentable square feet.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The company uses JD Edwards as its property management and financial system for all of its REITs. JDE’s reporting capabilities are limited and business users had difficulty analyzing data in a robust way. Business analysts spent weeks wrestling with Excel to prepare supplemental financial reports each quarter. In addition, it was difficult to gain actionable data regarding financial performance, debt loads, occupancy, leasing activity, and accounts receivable risk.

Objectives
The Inland Real Estate Group’s project requirements included:

  • A self-service environment for data analysis
  • Data to satisfy investor relations requirements
  • Actionable operational analysis
  • Reduced reliance on IT-driven and manual report generation

SOLUTION
To help the Inland Real Estate Group achieve its goals for business intelligence, SWC Technology Partners developed analysis environments for the financial, leasing, and accounts receivable domains and delivered end-user analysis via Excel and SharePoint dashboards.

ANALYSIS ENVIRONMENTS
The analysis environments leverage data and infrastructure already in place at the Inland Real Estate Group. SWC was able to compile data from Inland Group’s multiple software systems, including JD Edwards and an existing leasing pipeline management system into a single place where business users can analyze data and run reports.

In the Accounts Receivable environment, users can “slice and dice” data to analyze collection risk. The Leasing environment reveals current and future occupancy issues, lease negotiations, and signed leases. The Financial analysis environment, allows users to analyze data about net operating income, yield, debt, and demographics. In addition, variances against budgets and forecast can be understood.

TECHNOLOGY
SWC took advantage of Microsoft® SQL Server to integrate data from the Inland Real Estate Group’s systems and build the multi-dimensional cubes at the center of the data context. In addition, Microsoft SharePoint provides the dashboards and graphical analysis tools. Excel is used for detailed and comprehensive data analysis.

SUCCESS
The business intelligence solution from SWC allows the Inland Real Estate Group’s business users to conduct data analysis that was previously impossible.

Today, business users can access the analysis environments and dashboards to retrieve reports, explore data, and make business decisions—without relying on the IT department and creating a backlog of reports. What’s more, managers can now make decisions about their property portfolios based on aggressive data analysis and performance indicators, as opposed to anecdotal evidence from property managers.

One of the Inland Real Estate Group’s REITs successfully re-financed $2.4B worth of debt during the worst of the financial crisis. The business intelligence tools described above played a crucial role in that effort.

ABOUT SWC TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS
SWC Technology Partners is an award-winning provider of IT solutions to midsize businesses. For more than 30 years, SWC has excelled at delivering technology solutions that optimize productivity, strengthen customer relationships, enhance data sharing and drive profitability. SWC specializes in the technology solutions that match the business needs of midmarket organizations including managed services; infrastructure solutions such as Unified Communications, virtualization and network security; and software solutions including SharePoint, business intelligence and custom development. Headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois, SWC is a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner and was honored as a Microsoft Central Region Partner of the Year in 2007, 2009 and 2010.

To learn more, visit www.swc.com or email info@swc.com or call 630.572.0240. Follow SWC on Facebook and on Twitter @SWCTechPartners.

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