Business Intelligence Finds a New Home

Leen Spaans, ICT manager at WonenCentraal housing corporation, says Information Builders WebFOCUS helped his company meet government regulations and streamline reporting processes.

WebFOCUS Helps WonenCentraal Housing Corporation Accommodate Changing Business Models

Property-management corporations that have traditionally made leasing and home services the thrust of their business are shifting gears with business models that now include services such as home care, security, and maintenance. Innovative information reporting and analysis – using proven methods such as balanced scorecards – is required to help these organizations keep their finger on the pulse of the market and anticipate pending changes.

WonenCentraal, based in Alphen aan den Rhine, Netherlands, manages almost 10,000 leased units in that region. "WonenCentraal is a mid-sized corporation," says Leen Spaans, ICT manager at WonenCentraal. "Even though we have a market share of only four percent of the 2.5 million units leased in the Netherlands, we are positioned in the middle segment of around 500 corporations, thanks to the size of our properties."

While the company is considered an industry pioneer for its use of modern reporting and analysis methods, finding software that could meet the unique needs of housing corporations was not an easy task, because housing corporations are subject to much governmental regulation with regards to reporting, housing benefits, house valuation, and other factors. "It’s a small field with only a few suppliers," Spaans explains. "Their applications focus mostly on the automation of the primary processes, and include registration systems for recording and monitoring.

"They claim they can handle the total scope of reporting and analysis needs, but this is hardly the case in practice. Their systems record everything perfectly, but you need various tools and homemade applications to extract the needed management information from them. It requires a lot of time and funds to build all that. It also needs to be done all over from scratch every five to six years, when a new system is introduced."

Trend Analyses

Spaans wanted a modern platform to streamline reporting activities, one that would work independently of the underlying primary systems. In other words, it would no longer be necessary to rebuild the entire environment every time a new production system was introduced. In addition, there was a great need for adequate management information.

"You want to make comparisons and perform trend analyses," he explains. "You want to answer questions like, ‘What are the lease arrears as of July 1st?’ But the underlying systems are usually relational, and contain no history. You need a data warehouse for that, to take a snapshot of the system each day. This puts your management reports and analyses just one click away."

Finding a solution to meet these needs eventually brought Spaans to Information Builders. "Their philosophy appealed to us," he affirmed. "They have been around for a long time, they have extensive in-house knowledge, and their business intelligence solutions operate independently from all production systems. I believe they can access almost any database platform. In addition, their WebFOCUS platform is highly innovative. And, most importantly, our dealings with the company have always been very pleasant."

WonenCentraal focuses on two main goals: increasing tenants’ satisfaction and streamlining housing maintenance. "We are currently setting up systems for purchasing maintenance based on multi-year contracts. Think of the maintenance of gutters and roofs, for example. We would contract with a maintenance company [that] will service the gutters and roofs according to fixed standards, and at a fixed price, for the next ten years," says Spaans.

Looking Ahead

In early 2002, WonenCentraal started building its data warehouse. "Internal decision-making took some time," Spaans claims. "As an IT specialist, you’re always looking two steps ahead. It took us a while to convince management that it was necessary to invest in the future. And, our results-oriented management project required some attention, and processes and procedures had to be defined."

The introduction of a data warehouse is not only a technical issue. It is relevant to the whole organization. Spaans noticed that developing clear concepts and terms would take a fair amount of time.

"The service desk, for example, interprets the ‘gross lease amount’ in a different way than the administration department," Spaans says. "The same goes for work requests. Resolving all these issues requires time. You cannot rush it. It is a useful exercise you cannot outsource, since it involves the description of your core business."

At the end of the summer of 2002, the data warehouse had been deployed, a number of reports had been developed, and the figures had been validated. The most common detailed lists for end users had also been made available. The system now produces information for the company-wide balanced scorecard.

"We will now be able to introduce balanced scorecards across the whole company," he adds. "The fact that the data warehouse is perfectly suited for this purpose was an important factor in the decision-making process."

All department-level scorecards should also be ready by early 2003. Spaans has also noticed that the organization handles information more consciously as a result of the modernization of data access and reporting. "Various assumptions were questioned. Various overviews were created, without knowing what they were for. We have stopped doing that," he says.

More has been planned. For the short term, WonenCentraal hopes to give other parties, such as municipalities and contractors, access to the environment so they can retrieve their own information or feed the system themselves," Spaans states. "Information accessibility for tenants will also be extended. Our housing stock is already available on the Internet. Furthermore, we are considering making information like the status of a maintenance complaint readily available. The data warehouse and WebFOCUS will make these things relatively easy. It provides us with a platform that we will be able to use for a long time."