A lot is happening for financial professionals at publicly listed companies. In January of this year, government bodies introduced new lease accounting standards to improve financial transparency. Of course, it is crucial to show that your lease administration complies with external regulations. However, there’s also a more qualitative, interesting side to the story.
When your lease data is appropriately managed, and you have the tools and skills to derive important insights from it in clear reports for internal purposes, you are identifying major opportunities and reducing financial risks for your organisation. In this blog I want to explain how you can start predicting and anticipating the future with big data, and how Planon can contribute to this important objective.
The first thing you need to do is to make sure that lease data is properly collected and stored. Many companies are already aware of this and are investing in the deployment of a coherent data management process for leasing. This is an important first step in the improvement process towards controlling your lease portfolio. You basically need a reliable and integrated database in place that can potentially support decisions and take the right corrective or preventive action. Because nowadays everyone should know that: ‘Data really powers everything we do.’
Just having the data is not enough. It should be translated into useful insights with the help of the right analytics tool. However, survey research from Forrester shows that ‘most organisations aren’t using analytics efficiently, as only 12% of data is analysed’. It seems that a lot more can be done to get fully on top of lease data, identifying great investment opportunities and ways to minimise costs. As a financial professional you don’t want to miss out on this, and you want to steer your department towards organisational goals. You want to identify risks early and resolve them in time before they do too much damage to the organisation. I certainly agree with Isaac Pernas, CIO of JLL, who said that ‘if you ask the right questions and use the correct tools to extract the data you will surely make better decisions than ever before’.
Of course, it’s great to have your specific analytics on leases from a financial perspective. But imagine if you could combine lease and financial analysis with your company’s real estate portfolio strategy and with financial information about your real estate and maintenance operations? This could create completely new insights for your lease renewal strategy, your company’s real estate transaction plans, or identify the best opportunities for capital investments in your portfolio. This new window of opportunity can become reality by combining your lease accounting solution with an Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) and a smart analytics tool.
These steps seem logical, but to implement this in your day to day work will require a certain mindset. Focus should be on wanting to invest in leveraging cross-functional big data in such a way that it truly adds value to your organisation. In this story, software is an unmissable piece of the puzzle. And this is where Planon can help – by joining both financial professionals and real estate executives with high value analytics.
Planon Connect for Analytics is a connector between all Planon Universe solutions and a series of external analytics tools. In this way, your existing BI or analytics tool that you have become familiar with (e.g. Microsoft Power BI, Qlik, or Tableau) can now be combined with a Planon data lake that can contain all data about your leases, real estate portfolio, space utilisation, costs, projects etc. This enables you to create new KPIs, analytics and predictions in a simple and easy way.
With Planon Connect for Analytics, you discover new insights, have reliable data to create scenarios for the future, and can demonstrate your value to senior management. And, finally, reporting is less time consuming. Are you interested in learning more? Watch our webinar about Planon Connect for Analytics or contact us.
