In the real estate industry, it’s critical for individuals to manage their real estate portfolios in an efficient and user-friendly way. Having the tools to do this can lead to portfolio growth, lower expenditures, and myriad other benefits, while an ineffective system can put businesses behind their competitors in the marketplace.
The team at Cushman & Wakefield understand this, which is why the company is rolling out Tango, the company’s global project management and business intelligence platform. With accurate reporting, project accounting, and forecasting, Tango’s mobile capabilities facilitate increased productivity and, therefore, reduced expenses for Cushman & Wakefield clients.
“Along with talent, real estate is often one of the most expensive elements of doing business for many of our global clients,” says Tony Belli, Cushman & Wakefield’s senior managing director, project management Americas service line lead, global occupier services. “Tango provides tools that allow us to act as a truly integrated service provider so that we can help them develop more efficient and effective workplace and portfolio strategies than ever before.”
The platform’s data aggregation and analytics capabilities, combined with data from other service line applications, reveal trends and solutions that were previously unavailable through manual inspection. With a few mouse clicks, users and clients will be able to access comprehensive information describing their portfolios and individual projects in an easily accessible dashboard format. As the software integrates data across global portfolios, Cushman & Wakefield program and project managers will be able to review better information to help their clients make better decisions.
Additionally, this technology integrates with solutions from other service lines, such as facilities management, transaction management, and lease administration. Without silos between essential functions, Cushman & Wakefield will have greater capability to deliver strategic solutions, leading to a more balanced real estate portfolio for clients. For example, questions related to portfolio strategy—such as the size, location, and types of spaces—can be coordinated with workplace styles and preferences. Excess or underutilized space can be repurposed, leased, or completely disposed of to better align with overall business objectives.
Project management is another key area where this technology will provide a customized and scalable approach with solutions to support fully dedicated teams, partially dedicated teams, variable teams, and a centralized model, Belli says. Those team structures can be combined to tailor the company’s approach to every client, while remaining agile enough to adapt as a client’s needs change.
“Whether clients need dedicated, centralized, or localized support—or a customized combination—we can adapt the configuration as needs and priorities of the business evolve,” says Belli.
However, Belli says that the technology won’t be able to function successfully without talented people maintaining it, and that means properly informing and training people on Tango. In fact, that message was reinforced when he was leading an initiative with a previous employer. In addition to transforming its traditional environment to a next-generation workspace with shared, open areas, and natural light, he and his team were responsible for breaking the news to employees that the change was taking place.
“The construction was easy,” Belli says. “Managing the personal relationships and expectations was the hard part. We had to build connections with people whose lives we were changing and help them understand the benefits they would enjoy once the work was finished.”
“You can have all the technology in the world, but you still have to understand the client culture,” he adds. “If you have that, you can mitigate 90 percent of the potential challenges before they even happen.”
Belli spent most of 2017 enhancing the value drivers on his team; integrating additional key services such as strategy, design, and occupancy to the project team; and supporting the flexibility and scalability of his team in existing and new client delivery models. The efforts, such as the implementation of Tango, have paid off with the addition of new clients like Google and Adobe.
He sees more wins like those in the near future as the value and capabilities that Tango provides become more evident. Beyond traditional project management, he anticipates that value will include cost savings, speed to market, and integration efficiency as well as consistent quality and continuous improvement.
“Being able to show that we do much more than manage projects is a huge opportunity,” Belli explains. “It’s a chance to show how we can leverage comprehensive integration, which is new in our industry. Our challenge is to demonstrate how it benefits our internal operations as well as provides dynamic improvements to all aspects of our clients’ portfolios.”
Companies that manage hundreds of projects annually for tens of millions of square feet across the globe need meaningful insights into the structure of their portfolios and quality data to drive strategic decisions and maximize long-term cost savings. With Tango, Cushman & Wakefield is offering a tool for faster execution to deliver the competitive advantages they require.
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