Oxford Property Group Gains Ground With WebFOCUS

Real Estate Company Expands Reporting to Weather Downturn

Oxford Properties Group owns, develops, and manages commercial real estate globally and has a dominant Canadian base. Headquartered in Toronto with more than 1,300 employees throughout Canada, Oxford offers a wide array of services, including leasing space, managing tenants, collecting rent, processing bills, and tracking property values. Its portfolio consists of office towers, shopping centers, industrial parks, luxury hotels, and multi-residential properties.

Like many companies in commercial real estate, space is Oxford's primary inventory and developing it is one of its primary concerns. To overcome the industry's reluctance to embrace cyberspace and achieve a competitive edge in this fast-moving market, Oxford needed to upgrade its business intelligence (BI) infrastructure to simplify the demands of managing its properties. Advanced reporting and analysis capabilities were also crucial to supporting its plans to expand globally.

Oxford has been a longtime Information Builders customer, initially using its WebFOCUS BI platform on an HP Alpha OpenVMS system and later on Microsoft SQL Server. Most recently Oxford has used it on an IBM iSeries computer in conjunction with a JD Edwards financial accounting system. Oxford has used WebFOCUS to build a solid foundation of parameterized reports that allow both internal and external users to sort and summarize information related to their properties.

Its primary reporting application, called Oxford's Advanced Strategic Information Source (OASIS), is an asset and performance measurement application that allows users to analyze tens of millions of square feet of real estate properties. OASIS offers a rich source of information about properties, tenants, and operations. It also includes a customer-facing portal that hosts a library of timely, comprehensive reports, providing instant details about everything from tenants, outstanding bills, and property histories to legal clauses and company financials. WebFOCUS makes it very easy to report against this information in real time.

A Solid Foundation for Operational Reporting

The ability to provide value-added services to its clients has set Oxford apart from its competitors – strengthening existing partner relationships while helping to solidify business agreements, especially in joint-venture deals that require information-sharing with potential clients. In some cases, the benefit of an excellent reporting system makes Oxford a better partner than other firms. 

"We have achieved a level of excellence in our reporting environment at Oxford, and the WebFOCUS technology we employ every day contributes to that success," says Susan Wells, director of Systems and Programming at Oxford Properties Group. "We have never encountered a reporting challenge that we can't solve with our WebFOCUS solution."

For example, when the leasing group needed to know which spaces had options against them, it was easy to gather this information. By extracting these legal clauses from JD Edwards and loading it into the data warehouse, employees can now create stacking plans that tell them at a glance whether a client has an option that must be honored.

"Using scheduled WebFOCUS reports to alert the leasing staff as tenancies come to the end of their term and space becomes available gives them proactive insight critical to maintaining property revenues," says Wells. "Certainly they had that information before, but this system makes it easier to stay on top of the status of each property."

Expanding the BI Footprint

Oxford Properties Group has an IT staff of 32 people. Wells works primarily on the applications side of the company's IT team and is involved with any software the company builds or buys.

Once OASIS was implemented throughout the company, Wells and her team tackled a new challenge: generating monthly consolidated financial reports for their stakeholders from their general ledger database. Oxford used WebFOCUS to create these consolidated financial reports as well as audit reports to validate results between the source and target systems. The team originally tried to write these reports using the JD Edwards Report Writer. However, it took 23 hours to consolidate the data and generate the reports – a timeline that simply wasn't viable. So they created a BI system that summarizes the data as the transactions are recorded in real time, enabling WebFOCUS to generate consolidated financial reports in just five minutes. "We've reduced the cycle time at the month's end," Wells says.

Moving Up With New Technology

As Oxford Properties continues to grow, Wells and her team are developing a BI portal to replace an earlier menu-based reporting system. The new portal will include content based on users roles and level of access. For example, a director will see the property information grouped by reporting region, whereas an accounts receivable clerk will see all of his tenants' names.

"There is a vast and detailed warehouse of information in OASIS and the budget system, which can be surfaced in a more relevant manner to Oxford users," explains Wells. "Use of key performance indicators and variance-to-budget on a role-by-role basis focuses management on the areas that need improvement."

Additionally, by using existing reports from its WebFOCUS library, Oxford can resurface them on the portal with minimal effort. Users can still access options from a drop-down menu if they want to filter or drill in to the data without having to select parameters.

Wells estimates that everyone in the company can benefit from this type of easy access to information, from the company's accountants to operations managers and executives. "The greater insight we have into our tenants and inventory of available space, the better we are able to ensure that each property is well managed and creating good returns," says Wells. "It was important that we developed a solution with the flexibility to deliver information tailored to our specific needs. WebFOCUS has enabled us to do just that."

Remodeling Infrastructure to Reduce Costs

In the future, Wells and her team plan to do away with the current financial data warehouse system. Rather than staging the information from the production applications into this warehouse once per day, Oxford will use Information Builders' iWay DB2 adapters to extract the data directly from the source systems upon demand.

"A lot has changed since we built the data warehouse," admits Wells. "Now, the networks are quicker, security is more refined, and we are less worried about impacting production operations with a report request. With WebFOCUS directly accessing our production systems, we will obtain more current information and avoid the expense of maintaining a separate reporting database. It's one more example of how WebFOCUS has enabled Oxford to better manage its data."