Tips from the Teachers

YASC presenters share insight

By Leah Etling on Sep 23, 2013 in People

If you are joining us for our upcoming Yardi Advanced Solutions Conference in Anaheim, Calif., from Oct. 9-11, you can look forward to an experience that will be packed with value. From the course sessions, which are tailored to your corporate needs, to the chance to troubleshoot Yardi issues one-on-one in the computer lab, to networking and learning from your peers, there’s something for everyone at our bi-annual conference.

Held for the first time this year in Anaheim, our entire conference team looks forward to meeting you and engaging productively to help you better use our software and systems.

At the conclusion of each conference (events are held annually on the East Coast in the spring and on the West Coast in the fall), attendees are asked to review the speakers and teachers who led their classes. Thanks to their invaluable feedback, we were able to seek out some of the top Yardi experts who you may encounter at YASC.

Thanks to their insight and contributions, we’re able to share a quick primer on some of the recommendations they have for you during your time at YASC, and we hope you’ll have a chance to check out their classes!

 

Dwayne Jordan

Class everyone should take: “Tenant Ledgers is probably a good one. Everyone is going to have tenant ledgers, regardless of the market they are in. That’s a good class to help them troubleshoot some of those basic issues that everybody has.”

What he’s teaching in October: Advanced recoveries, advanced lease administration, reporting and other features, retail calculations and reporting. (Commercial.)

Why he’s a strong teacher: “I interact with clients as much as I can, stay upbeat and keep them on a good pace so they can ask questions and don’t feel uncomfortable asking questions. My background is in education, so I’ve been teaching since I was 22 years old.”

What value YASC offers for clients: “Finding out that they are not all alone out there. When they go through their processes, there are a lot of clients doing the same kinds of things, and maybe finding more efficient ways of doing the same kind of things. The interaction amongst them, the networking that they do, is probably the most beneficial. The classes are probably a close second but I think the interaction between them is probably most beneficial to most.”

If he was still a “real” teacher, he’d be instructing: Biology and earth science, for high school students

Favorite ride at Disneyland: The Matterhorn

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Matt Bridges

Advice for conference newcomers: “Find the newest thing, the newest piece of technology that we are highlighting in the opening statement, and go to that class.”

What he’s teaching: Everything related to maintenance, core maintenance, work orders, purchase orders, mobile, and advanced maintenance.

What you’ll hear in his sessions: “I think I have a lot of real world examples for what we use our product for. I try to keep it entertaining. Presenting Voyager can be pretty dry, especially when you stand behind a lectern and point at a power point. I try to engage the crowd, get out from behind the podium while I am speaking and try to get everyone paying attention.”

What’s most beneficial about YASC: “Definitely networking and seeing how other clients are solving their problems. They all have a great software toolkit, but everyone is using it slightly differently. Even in classes, someone will ask a question, and someone else (another client) will speak up and say hey, we solved it this way. Taking the classes and getting exposure to other clients and how they use our software is actually I think the best reason to go.”

What he’d teach in a real classroom: Physics or astronomy, for high school or early college students.

Favorite ride at Disneyland: Space Mountain

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Guy Brown

Class you should take: “It’s the first one I give every year at the conference. This year, my wife Deborah and I are doing it along with Ed Atkinson. It’s called ‘The Reporting Panel,’ and it basically attempts to tell clients, newbies especially, what are the possible (and there are many, many) reporting solutions that you can use to get data out of Voyager. It’s desperately confusing, because they’re changing all the time. Between the three of us, we know 98 percent of it.”

What else he’s teaching:  Yardi scripting and Excel reporting

How he keeps it interesting: “I’m a physicist by training, so I am devoted to digging out the truth of things. Consequently I think what I bring to the classroom is I’ll never pull one over on them. I’m confident enough to say: ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’ Voyager is so complicated! So much stuff in there! Nobody can ever really know the whole thing.”

I sing in rock and roll bands, so I know how to work a crowd. And I seem to get points for having an English accent. Bryant (Shoemaker) always tells people: ‘Go listen to Guy Brown, you’ll like his accent.’”

What’s most valuable about YASC: “I think it’s the ability to actually rub shoulders with developers and CSD types. And also be in classrooms with other clients of Yardi, because they’ll hear a sense of community. They’ll hear they are not the only people struggling with some issue.”

What he’d teach in a real classroom: Physics, which he taught as a graduate student.

Disneyland fan? Nope, he’s never been.

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Cliff Taylor

Class everyone should take: “Financial reporting overview. Especially for new clients. It goes over all the different pieces of financial reporting we have, out of the box and how to extend that with customization That’s my favorite class to teach. A lot of people walk out of it saying “Oh my gosh, I didn’t know all this existed. I already have that?” There’s no price tag on anything I show.”

What he’s teaching in October: 1099s. Mortgage. Advanced custom analytics.

How he keeps it interesting: “I don’t like teaching off the power point. I like to be in the system the whole time. So I will get all the normal errors that a client might find if they are unlucky, show them exactly the steps they are going to be following, and not ‘OK! There’s a slide, it works perfectly in power point, and here’s the next slide.’ They’re going to watch the workflow, see the buttons, understand exactly what we’re going through.”

What’s the most common question you hear? “’How do I get this?’ People see something they don’t normally have in their Voyager, whether its attributes, or segments, or this report, and they want to know how do I get that, does it cost me anything, do I have to install it? And the nice thing about those classes is that they’re all included in Voyager. “

What do clients benefit from most at the conference? “The little pieces. Another client asking a question they wouldn’t have thought of, and going down a route that is not directly applicable to their business but finding a golden Easter egg on the side trail that they can apply. It’s the surprise discoveries that really add leverage to their system.”

If you were a real teacher .. “My wife is a teacher, so I would definitely stay away from second grade. Probably high school math.”

Favorite Disneyland ride: Star Tours .. it never gets old for me.

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Bob McPhillips

Class everyone should take: Financial Best Practices. It focuses on accounting and the best practices way to use the Voyager program. For a look into the crystal ball, try Budgeting and Forecasting. We look into the future to see what’s coming up next.

How he helps everything come together: “My method is to intertwine the messages inside the classroom with the messages outside of the classroom. Anant Yardi will introduce the theme for the week at Wednesday morning’s opening session. I think its important to provide consistency and continuity in the class presentations along the lines of that theme.”

How he makes it interesting: Interactivity, and humor. We won’t give away any of his jokes, but you won’t walk out of one of Bob’s classes without a laugh or two.

What makes the conference worthwhile: “Talking to each other at lunch. The interaction between clients, discussing their methods or woes, often leaves to a ‘this is how I solved it’ moment. You’re hearing from someone who has the same problem as you have. What they take away from that is even more important than what we teach them.”

One reason he loves his job: The teaching aspect. He’d teach geometry or trigonometry if he was an educator. Solving problems with data variables, he notes, is not unlike the work of real estate industry technologists.

Insiders’ tip: If you are a golfer, seek out Bob and get involved in the golf tournament on Tuesday, Oct. 8 at Tustin Ranch. It’s always a good time with other Yardi clients and team members.

 

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Frank Fishedick

Class you should take: “Everyone should be at the general session (on Wednesday morning) to find out the direction of the company.”

What he’s teaching in October: One of our East Coast team members, Frank won’t be joining us in Anaheim, but you can catch him in May in Washington, D.C.

How he makes class interesting: “I try to think about what the clients need, keep it basic, on topic, and make it fun for them so they don’t get bored to death. I want to take them in a direction where they can go back with useful information.”

What’s most beneficial for clients at YASC: “Meeting contacts, whether it’s a Yardi employee or someone with a like business. If you don’t go for anything else, go to meet people. I really enjoy going to the tech center that we have set up, where questions that anyone has, we have an answer to.”