December 18. 2020 - 6 min. reading time
Why? Who? What? Wherewith? Where?
Digital business processes for portfolio holders.
by Marc Gille
In quite a few articles on digitalization strategies, the concept of the business process is used as an essential means of digital transformation about
Flexibilization,
Acceleration,
Interactivity and
Innovation
endeavors. In fact, you can also quickly find what you are looking for in the area of digitalization in real estate operations. Here are some thoughts and examples in today's blog.
The anatomy of business processes
A business process describes procedures within and between companies and answers the following questions
Why was the procedure initiated? - The tenant has reported damage. Anomaly detection has detected damage to a pump. According to regulatory requirements, the sprinklers must be checked every 6 weeks.
Who takes part? - The tenant. The janitor. The FM. The pump manufacturer. An instructed technical employee.
What do the parties involved in the process have to do - one after the other and in parallel? - Repair the damage. Commission the pump manufacturer to repair the damage. Fill out the sprinkler log.
What do the participants have to work with? - Documents. Devices. Information. Software systems.
When operating a property, the 'where' often also plays a role - namely 'where' in the building, on the campus or in the branches.
Business process models have long been used to precisely describe these "Ws", as this illustration from the 1930s shows:
Even back then, it was clear that if I followed such process structures, I could avoid errors, ensure the quality of the results and increase my transparency and efficiency.
Digital process execution
Motivated by these obvious advantages, people began integrating business process management into software systems more than 40 years ago. These approaches are also established in real estate operations:
Case management is a core component of CAFM systems.
Processes for onboarding and offboarding tenants are part of real estate modules of ERP systems.
With increasing digitalization via mobile devices, cloud computing and the Internet of Things, process control in real estate operations can be implemented even more efficiently:
The people involved in the process are practically always available on the move, regardless of their location, and can therefore be integrated into a process immediately.
Data and systems are available and accessible to the user via the cloud.
Processes across company boundaries - Collaboration
Even if we can now implement business process management digitally better than ever before, one obstacle remains: Processes often span the boundaries of companies that have all invested in business process management in different organizational and technical ways. These organizational and technical boundaries need to be bridged:
A catering order is initiated together with a room booking in a company's booking system, but is further processed in the caterer's ordering and merchandise management systems.
A damage report is either processed by the internal IT department or forwarded to the FM service provider.
The inventors of business process modeling have taken this aspect into account: they speak of collaboration in which process flows are loosely coupled across company boundaries:
Implementation of processes in the building operating system
The declared aim of my blogs is not to turn digitization projects for real estate operations into expensive and lengthy software integration projects, but to enable the efficient, scalable rollout of a building operating system across the entire portfolio quickly and cost-effectively and to address the special features of individual properties and locations by making simple adjustments to the configuration.
This is why we also provide business process management with BPMN process modeling as a core component of our building operating system Thing-it, so that even complex processes can be configured quickly and without programming knowledge:
Users can then easily initiate process flows configured in the system via their mobile devices (damage reports, orders for services, approval of pets or subtenants, etc.).
We can also use the status of systems to identify malfunctions or inefficiencies and initiate processing or start processes periodically (e.g. sprinkler checks or guard rounds).
Since we know the users in their roles, we can assign tasks to them via their mobile devices, e.g. to process claims, orders or applications for approval.
We can take the indoor location or geolocation into account everywhere and, if necessary, guide users to locations via navigation.
If follow-up or further processing is required in other systems, e.g. for claims processing in a CAFM system, we forward via publish/subscribe mechanisms or REST interface calls. Incidentally, this is very flexible: depending on the type of claim, it may be necessary to contact internal processors in one case or the FM service provider in another.
In all these processes, however, the corporate real estate manager or asset manager has a central overview of the status and history of the business processes handled in their portfolio thanks to our building operating system and can evaluate these in terms of efficiency and sustainability.
Get in touch
You have questions?
Message or call us - or request your demo today.