Operational Efficiency

Cost Savings, Automation with Orion BI

By Erica Rascón on Jun 20, 2016 in News

Lisa Kolb, Senior Systems Analyst at A.J. Dwoskin & Associates, Inc. and an independent technology consultant, witnessed the company’s transition from Jenark to Yardi in 2011. Yardi was the right choice for the company’s mixed portfolio, which includes residential, commercial and retail assets.

Most recently, Yardi Orion Business Intelligence has improved A.J. Dwoskin’s operational efficiency. Yardi Orion® Business Intelligence is a browser-agnostic, mobile-friendly platform that easily creates simple-to-use dashboards to analyze the operational and financial health of a portfolio. The software ensures secure access to data that helps owners and managers improve business performance.

For Kolb, the decision to invest in Yardi was a “no-brainer.”

“The seamless integrations are what we dreamt about in the 1980s,” she told us. “I use to get paid a lot of money to do software comparisons for clients. Game over – it is Yardi. When companies bring me in (as a consultant), I always tell them that Yardi is the solution because of the stack and the integrations to the web.”

Yardi’s seamless integration is supported by intuitive interface, industry-specific functionality, and continually evolving software. The trio of features keeps clients at the top of their game.

“In the past, we would make requests to software vendors and beg for functionality. Now, Yardi is bringing it to us and saying: ‘Here’s what the industry is doing, you may need this.’ We aren’t falling behind technologically. We’re ahead of the curve,” says Kolb.

Orion Business Intelligence encourages AJ Dwoskin to revisit and reengineer its procedures.  The software features more than 200 built-in key performance indicators and flexible reports that provide a 360-degree view of the organization—including discrepancies.

“BI puts a spotlight on your KPIs and whether or not you are focusing at the right ones for a given period,” she says. “The first thing we learned when we took BI live was that we had problems with how people were processing in Yardi. It made us audit the processes more thoroughly on-site, exam results and we knew we had to change some procedures. That was huge. It really made us fine tune our processes.”

For AJ Dwoskin, one of the most cost-effective (and visually compelling) advantages of Orion Business Intelligence Document Management has been the ability to take the organization paperless.

When the corporate office relocated, a decision was made to downsize the required square footage and eliminate off-site storage, creating a notable cost savings.

“We had over one million sheets of paper OCR scanned and digitized, and they all now reside in Orion Sharepoint Document Management. We saved a lot of money when we scanned all our paper and we didn’t have to pay to store it anymore,” says Kolb. “All of our original lease documents, site blueprints, alta development plans – they were all scanned and uploaded and are now available at our fingertips.”

“I love that before [our bi-weekly] meetings, no one is running around making photocopies and sharing paper anymore. We are now logging on to the big flat screen, and showing people the data, and if they ask for a copy we tell them to go back to their desk and log on.”

Kolb adds, “Now it’s a click of a button and we have everything we need. And it’s formatted nicely, with charts and graphs. It really is unbelievable.”

The on-demand access and automated processes of Orion Business Intelligence helped to attract fresh talent to A.J. Dwoskin. Both features have proven to meet the expectations of Millennial new hires.

“In general, employees of the younger generation have a heightened expectation that things will be automated. The Millennials’ expectations of technology are high, and we’ve been able to attract employees because of our technology solutions.”

The digitized and fully automated office offers a chic workspace that resonates with younger employees:  a spacious atmosphere with glass walls, fun smart boards in place of TV screens, minimalist design, and absolutely no clutter.

“We all have one shelf, and there’s nothing on it,” laughs Kolb. “The employees feel like they are working for a higher caliber company because of our Yardi technology solutions, and they are.”

To learn more about Orion Business Intelligence, join an upcoming webinar.