First Industrial Realty Builds Self-Sufficiency With Enterprise Business Intelligence

Commercial Real Estate Trust Transforms Enterprise Reporting Capabilities With WebFOCUS

As a real estate investment trust, First Industrial Realty Trust engages in the ownership, management, acquisition, sale, and development of industrial real estate properties. The company is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and has more than 20 regional offices.

When First Industrial implemented a business intelligence (BI) environment supported by Crystal Reports from Business Objects, users found it difficult to export data to Microsoft Excel. "The usability of our reporting environments wasn’t very good," admits Brenda Smith, director of IT services at First Industrial. "You had to open three or four different applications to gather information. We wanted our property managers to be able to get all the information they needed in one place."

First Industrial deployed Information Builders WebFOCUS BI platform to provide users with convenient, intuitive, and flexible access to property, tenant, leasing, legal, and financial data from a variety of homegrown and third-party applications. Information is delivered via customizable dashboards. The team also replaced a real estate reporting software package called First Request from Resolve Technologies. By empowering executives and employees with better access to vital information, the company has increased productivity by improving its management of property portfolios and sites, tenant relationships, finances, and vendors.

Surveying the Technology Options

To maximize employee efficiency, First Industrial decided to deploy a Web-based BI environment that could combine data from multiple systems, seamlessly integrate with Excel, and bolster re-porting and analysis capabilities for end users. The company evaluated BI solutions from Business Objects and Oracle, and also explored richer reporting options with Resolve Technologies, hoping for an upgrade path to a later version of Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft .Net.

First Industrial determined that none of these options was ideal. Then the company saw a demonstration of WebFOCUS. "WebFOCUS seemed to have the dynamics we were looking for, and we were very impressed by what we saw during this half-day session," recalls Fred DuBois, senior business systems analyst at First Industrial. "The integration with Excel was excellent and the WebFOCUS development platform matched our needs."

First Industrial ideally wanted to contract with one software vendor for BI as well as extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools. When it learned about DataMigrator and the many data adapters available from Information Builders’ iWay Software division, the company became increasingly enthusiastic about the complete package.

"To clinch the deal, Information Builders spent about a week creating a proof of concept," says DeBois. "We posed some tough challenges to both their reporting and integration teams, and Information Builders responded well to all of them."

Constructing a Solid Reporting Foundation

First Industrial purchased WebFOCUS, iWay DataMigrator, and iWay adapters for Oracle and ODBC, along with an education package and licenses for 500 users. Information Builders Professional Services helped the company develop the initial reporting infrastructure and ETL environment. First Industrial then used the WebFOCUS portal in conjunction with third-party tools, such as Delphi and Cold Fusion, to build a comprehensive BI environment called, "The BI."

A Property Profile page features report icons to the left and document image links on the right.

"We used the WebFOCUS portal to create a customizable environment with lots of personalization so people can view particular property portfolios, consolidate groups, isolate certain geographic regions, and so forth," DuBois says.

First Industrial’s IT team prioritized the report development needs of the business. They duplicated the many Crystal Reports that were fundamental to the operation, and then replaced them with more flexible, parameter-driven WebFOCUS reports. Source systems include a JD Edwards financial application, a CRM system, a Stellent/Oracle content management system, and market feeds that reflect changes in the real estate industry. They also created an Oracle data warehouse, using DataMigrator to load and update it on a regular basis.

The BI provides users with customized, clear, accurate, and timely information. Smith says it has become the application of choice because:

• It is fast: reports that used to take minutes now run in seconds
• It is easy: users adapt quickly to the technology
• It is timely: data is pulled into the data warehouse hourly
• It is efficient: users can devote time to analysis instead of gathering information
• It is user focused: customized key performance metrics provide links to detailed information

Landscaping the BI Environment

First Industrial has customized WebFOCUS to meet the varied needs of many users, from administrators to executives. A colorful dashboard with tabs directs users to relevant reports.

Property managers use the Portfolio Management tab to run reports like Lease Abstracts and Tenant Rent Rolls. A Property Site Profile includes property address, ownership information, size and type of building, and other essential information. Users can link to documents stored in Stellent, such as leases and pertinent legal documents, and can also click on a Tenants tab to see information on current and past tenants.

Senior executives access the Performance tab, which presents key performance graphs such as projected occupancy, key vacancies, key rollovers, and leasing activity. This helps them quickly spot trends and react to fluctuations in the industrial real estate environment.

Although an ad hoc reporting option is available, most people run parameterized standard reports to ensure consistency. Within each report they can sort and select date ranges, property types, and regions. "WebFOCUS saves time and makes users more productive," says Chris Schneider, chief information officer, First Industrial. "Being able to obtain so much useful information from the same place is very powerful. Our staff is much more self-sufficient."

The accounting group uses The BI to run standard financial reports, including property statements, balance sheets, income statements, and trial balances. During annual property budget review, they also use The BI to review specific property details and to view linked documents, including property photographs, floor plans, leases, and financial documents. A new application in development called Accounts Payable Search will let users search payables by event, type of payment, and coding method. This is particularly useful for analyzing specific vendors.

Improving the View of Enterprise Data

With First Industrial’s previous reporting environment, users could not access all these documents or merge data from various applications using one cohesive BI system. They had to log in to multiple applications and manually consolidate data, sometimes making tedious manual entries into Excel. Now everything they need is accessible from the same place so users can automatically export their reports to Excel, preserving all necessary formatting, calculations, and links.

WebFOCUS integrates with First Industrial’s access management system and LDAP directory. Each user’s credentials are passed to all associated applications upon login, so they can view information via a single sign-on process.

First Industrial uses WebFOCUS Resource Governor to assist with administration and help system analysts optimize query performance. "Our reports run much faster now," says Smith. "A report that took two minutes to run in the old environment now executes in less than 30 seconds. All of those minutes add up when you have 175 users."

The BI environment has also made it easier to access consolidated information. "We are in the process of shutting down a business process in JD Edwards that takes two weeks to stage and run every quarter because of the data complexity," says DuBois. "Now WebFOCUS will do the same job in two days per month. It’s much more efficient since it can obtain information from the journal entries without storing any data. The capabilities of WebFOCUS were key to making this happen. It represents a huge savings in time and IT resources."

In the future, First Industrial plans to use WebFOCUS Active Technology reports to distribute monthly statements to property owners. The company also wants to integrate a geographic information system (GIS) to display properties on a map by type or location, enabling customers and prospects to access information geographically. DuBois says they are also starting to use WebFOCUS ReportCaster for scheduled reporting and they plan to create Report Libraries to archive useful reports.

"We have a very comprehensive BI environment based on WebFOCUS, and along the way we have pretty much replaced Crystal," DuBois concludes. "There are only ten Crystal reports left, out of 200+ initial ones. WebFOCUS is now our enterprise reporting standard."