{"id":43,"date":"2017-11-08T12:20:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T12:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/?p=43"},"modified":"2021-07-20T14:36:57","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T14:36:57","slug":"the-benefits-of-bi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/","title":{"rendered":"THE BENEFITS OF BI"},"content":{"rendered":"

In September, Yardi clients and employees gathered in sunny San Diego for the fall YASC<\/a> event. A record turnout made for an exciting three days of product demonstrations, user classes and networking. On the topic of advanced business intelligence software and what’s wor\"\"<\/a>king for clients, the Yardi Orion Business Intelligence Panel provided salient insights on making analytics available to all stakeholders — and best practices for delivering that data.<\/p>\n

On the panel were Dana Patterson, director of asset management at ALCO Management, Maria Braun, ERP business analyst at Bigos Management and Lisa Friedman, database coordinator at HCA Management Services. Aaron Wells, the Yardi client services team leader for BI, moderated.<\/p>\n

Choosing Orion BI over other options<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yardi Orion Business Intelligence<\/a> is a unique mobile-enabled platform that combines financial, operational and ancillary services data from Yardi Voyager<\/a> to deliver holistic portfolio insight. The system features configurable dashboards with more than 200 key performance measures to choose from, and provides flexible reporting functionality to both desktop computers and mobile devices that enables fast, informed decisions.<\/p>\n

Dana Patterson of ALCO said, “We saw several demos for BI software before selecting Orion, and discovered that companies using those systems had to hire someone because BI software that isn’t integrated with your property management platform requires staff or a consultant to manually upload data monthly and manage it. We didn’t want to add staff so Orion was an easy choice because it’s built into our Voyager platform. Orion is constantly pulling data, and all staff need to do is log in to access real-time information as well as historical data. No administration is needed, and updates happen automatically.”<\/p>\n

Patterson explained that ALCO also uses Yardi RENTmaximizer<\/a> for revenue management, Yardi Payment Processing<\/a> for electronic transactions and RENTCaf\u00e9<\/em><\/a> for marketing, leasing and online resident services. The addition of Orion to its Voyager platform combines all of that operational and ancillary services data to deliver powerful analytics across its portfolio.<\/p>\n

Bigos Management’s Maria Braun agreed with Patterson and added, “Orion has been really easy to use, no other option made sense. Our users have everything they need right in front of them and at their fingertips. They simply log in to Orion, and the analytics are there.”<\/p>\n

Lisa Friedman of HCA said, “Two years ago HCA worked with a consulting firm to build a BI solution. It took them three years to capture only half of our portfolio. I went to meetings and spent half of my time dealing with an interface. And embarrassingly — we already had Orion, but were only using it for one task. I didn’t even know we had it back then. So we got the team together and I asked them, ‘why aren’t we using Orion to pull our data in live? Why am I wasting my time dealing with an interface?’ Our VP wants to see things like NOI for particular divisions, with drill down. Orion can deliver that instantly. Cut to: we recreated our BI tasks using Orion and in just three days, we had our entire portfolio running on it.”<\/p>\n

An inside look at implementation<\/strong><\/p>\n

With no need for outside help, Patterson simply stated, “Orion implementation is easy. You don’t need a third party.” Friedman elaborated, “The hardest part is to determine what you really want to see, because you’re starting with a blank slate. We had some well-defined needs, and it’s quick and easy to get there with Orion. Your VP or any other exec or manager can look at the Orion dashboard and say, ‘let’s add this column, let’s change this view or calculation,’ and Orion will put that right in front of them. That’s the beauty of the implementation — getting everything right as you want it from the start.”<\/p>\n

Friedman said, “We have been on Orion for seven months, and it is very simple and easy to use, because we are working within our Voyager permissions and setup. With the blank slate we had at implementation, I knew what I wanted to do, because I issue weekly and monthly Excel reports that I used to spend hours on every week and so much time on every month gathering information out of Voyager, dumping data into an Excel file and then sending the reports to our managers. Then we would play our email game and go back and forth and ask our questions: ‘Why are your numbers this and not that?’ and so on. So that was our first order of business: we started implementation, set up users.  It follows Voyager security so setup was really easy.”<\/p>\n

Friedman also referred to financial mapping in Orion, and the ease of using existing account trees. She added, “The option is right there in Orion to use the account trees you already built. You can map directly to them. How easy is that?” On the subject of customization, Friedman continued, “We like to do a lot of custom reporting, and we measure things differently. With our primarily affordable housing portfolio, we customize reporting on receivables. I don’t care about what’s due from HUD, because HUD pays its bills and I know we’re going to collect. I want to see the status of resident payments.”<\/p>\n

The panel agreed that online Orion training videos are very helpful, as are regularly scheduled team calls with their Yardi account managers. One challenge they pointed out is the cultural shift in an organization when you start to do things differently, as occurs with any technology adoption. You need to get staff into the habit of logging into Orion and using dashboards to access data versus passively receiving periodic reports. Friedman added, “Our Orion account manager spent time walking us through the process for creating tiles and widgets. Creating them is actually pretty easy. The system is capable of so much! We hit the ground running once our staff got into the habit of logging in and using their dashboards.”<\/p>\n

Braun stated, “Implementation was really easy and worry free. Orion already had the tiles and widgets we needed, and you can play with them and change them up to whatever works best for your company. We also have custom measures, and it’s really easy to work with them.  I think we had most dashboards set up in a matter of weeks, maybe a month. The only challenge was getting our staff into the routine of logging in to their dashboards.”<\/p>\n

Friedman agreed, “It’s going to be a culture shift to get your staff into the simple habit of logging in to Orion, if they used to get an email with reports attached. Orion makes it easy for every stakeholder to monitor the financial health of their properties.” Friedman added that for staff who prefer visual displays, the graphs are really useful. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Getting to those “aha” moments<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The job cost dashboard gave me an ‘aha’ moment, when I discovered it’s so easy to make it more user friendly without the need to run reports. All I need is a dashboard with tiles and widgets. It’s amazingly helpful,” said Patterson.<\/p>\n

Friedman elaborated, “HCA owns around 600 properties located from Alaska to Miami and our VP needs to see things at a lot of different levels, including NOI or any financial information at a division level, with drill down to the campus and market levels and to see specific buildings and leases. With Orion, we can drill down from a macro level down to a very narrow or micro level.”<\/p>\n

Of further value to HCA, according to Friedman, is how Orion enables them to view and compare utility costs between divisions and campuses since they can pull an entire GL and do a cost analysis. The company is also able to compare productivity of individual property managers as well as entire management companies, and can compare cost per square foot for any GL category they are tracking, including utility costs. She added, “It’s really easy to put things together at a detail level or an overview level on Orion dashboards.”<\/p>\n

Patterson added, “With Orion you can change filters and explore a whole division. You can view campuses and buildings. This ability enabled one of our managers to easily take over a new division. That’s incredibly powerful.”<\/p>\n

Learn more about Yardi Orion Business Intelligence<\/a> and Yardi’s full-business platforms for multifamily<\/a>, affordable <\/a>and commercial <\/a>real estate management.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In September, Yardi clients and employees gathered in sunny San Diego for the fall YASC event. A record turnout made for an exciting three days of product demonstrations, user classes and networking. On the topic of advanced business intelligence software and what’s working for clients, the Yardi Orion Business Intelligence Panel provided salient insights on making analytics… <\/p>\n

Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12613,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"metadata":{"_pingme":["1","1","1","1"],"_encloseme":["1","1","1","1"]},"yoast_head":"\nTHE BENEFITS OF BI - ALCO Management Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"THE BENEFITS OF BI - ALCO Management Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In September, Yardi clients and employees gathered in sunny San Diego for the fall YASC event. A record turnout made for an exciting three days of product demonstrations, user classes and networking. On the topic of advanced business intelligence software and what’s working for clients, the Yardi Orion Business Intelligence Panel provided salient insights on making analytics… Read More →\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"ALCO Management Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-11-08T12:20:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-07-20T14:36:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.yardi.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/img-bi-lifestyle-001.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"ALCO\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"ALCO\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/\",\"name\":\"THE BENEFITS OF BI - ALCO Management Blog\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2017-11-08T12:20:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-07-20T14:36:57+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/a4708521215f6e075c96a75227b9128e\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"THE BENEFITS OF BI\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"ALCO Management Blog\",\"description\":\"Just another Rent Cafe Blogs Sites site\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/a4708521215f6e075c96a75227b9128e\",\"name\":\"ALCO\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/73007d95cadeef73b69fa61c08865a4be079f205fd2e1213434e3f5b978a07a2?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/73007d95cadeef73b69fa61c08865a4be079f205fd2e1213434e3f5b978a07a2?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"ALCO\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/author\/wpc_6876\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"THE BENEFITS OF BI - ALCO Management Blog","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"THE BENEFITS OF BI - ALCO Management Blog","og_description":"In September, Yardi clients and employees gathered in sunny San Diego for the fall YASC event. A record turnout made for an exciting three days of product demonstrations, user classes and networking. On the topic of advanced business intelligence software and what’s working for clients, the Yardi Orion Business Intelligence Panel provided salient insights on making analytics… Read More →","og_url":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/","og_site_name":"ALCO Management Blog","article_published_time":"2017-11-08T12:20:00+00:00","article_modified_time":"2021-07-20T14:36:57+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"https:\/\/www.yardi.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/img-bi-lifestyle-001.jpg"}],"author":"ALCO","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"ALCO","Est. reading time":"7 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/","url":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/","name":"THE BENEFITS OF BI - ALCO Management Blog","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#website"},"datePublished":"2017-11-08T12:20:00+00:00","dateModified":"2021-07-20T14:36:57+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/a4708521215f6e075c96a75227b9128e"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/08\/the-benefits-of-bi\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"THE BENEFITS OF BI"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/","name":"ALCO Management Blog","description":"Just another Rent Cafe Blogs Sites site","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/a4708521215f6e075c96a75227b9128e","name":"ALCO","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/73007d95cadeef73b69fa61c08865a4be079f205fd2e1213434e3f5b978a07a2?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/73007d95cadeef73b69fa61c08865a4be079f205fd2e1213434e3f5b978a07a2?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"ALCO"},"url":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/author\/wpc_6876\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12613"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46,"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alcomgt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}