Upgrade Like a Rock Star

Fairfield Residential Embraces 7S

By Erica Rascón on Feb 8, 2017 in People

Our “Upgrade Like a Rock Star” series provides insider tips for a seamless transition to Yardi Voyager® 7S.  In this segment, Senior Business Analyst Melanie Moyers shares how Fairfield Residential made the conversion across 50,000 units of multifamily and affordable properties.

First, Fairfield Residential shifted from self-hosted to hosted on Voyager 6. Yardi Subject Matter Experts assisted Moyers and her team through an extensive series of test scripts. The joint effort made the transition effortless.

Moyers says, “We really didn’t have anything come up during testing whatsoever just going to hosted so that was very quick!”

After the two-month transition from self-hosted to hosted, the company began the conversion to Voyager 7S property management platform.

Testing and Training

Moyers explains the process: “For 7S, we did a more extensive testing. We made sure we had two users from every single permission group. We have a lot of user groups and permissions do change, like little hidden permissions in 7S, so it was very helpful to do that.”

She continues, “It was extensive on the testing part but we tried to limit it as far as what people actually tested so they were only doing things that they really know about. In IT, we took the bulk of running through a huge script to make sure everything was covered.”

Originally, the three-person IT team planned for three months of testing. They decided to request the support of three additional application support technicians. Then they extended the testing phase to four months in order to accommodate changing permissions.

“We went ahead and added an extra month just so we would do a second round of testing with all those same people. We got a clean script from every single one of them,” says Moyers.

Fairfield Residential’s education department for property management facilitated training for onsite personnel. The group assessed software changes that would affect most of the group, then educated the staff via webinar. Perhaps more importantly, the training department garnered excitement for the new software.

“The training was more about building excitement for them, to not be scared that something new was coming out,” says Moyers.

Moyers led training for the corporate staff. She broke the general sessions into hour-long increments then hosted additional 30-minute sessions for accountants and those with changing roles.

After four months of testing, the team was ready to go live. The IT department braced itself for a flood of help desk request. The group was pleasantly surprised.

“We anticipated that there was going to be a big uptick of help desk requests. There wasn’t actually that much but we had the whole team geared up for it, so we were pulling all those tickets right away. But later in analyzing the data we actually only had about three weeks of increase and then it completely went back to normal,” recalls Moyers.

Challenges

One of the only problems that Moyers encountered came with users’ perception of speed. Voyager 7S added a load bar, a visual that alarmed some employees.

“I think because people saw the load bar, people were like, ‘Oh, it’s slower. It’s slower!’” laughs Moyers.  “We had our old Voyager 6 environment available still. We would actually get on a GoToMeeting and show them it was faster in the new environment. That helped a lot because it was just a mental thing to them and there were a few hanging onto that.”

Favorite New Features

Among the upgraded features, five have received notable praise from the Fairfield Residential staff.

The new menu search tops the list of favorites. It allows users to enter a query directly on the main dashboard.

AJAX auto-fill search makes exploring 7S resources faster and easier. Users enter a word, phrase, or partial word in the Search box.  Voyager 7S quickly retrieves matching menu items. There is no need for exact client IDs or even complete phrases.

Improved lease proposal batches also impresses Moyers. While previous incarnations seemed clunky to operate, 7S makes the function more intuitive.

Bulk actions facilitate efficiencies across the board. “It is also easier to keep up with the administration and cleanup of the database because functions are now available for tasks like deleting empty batches,” explains Moyers.

Lastly, onsite crews are excited about the enhanced functionalities of Yardi Maintenance Manager Mobile™.

“We are using Mobile Maintenance now and that was actually one of the main reasons we went to 7S,” says Moyers. “We were just up against a wall where we couldn’t really move forward with any new initiatives until we could get the upgrade.”

Since implementing the maintenance management tool, Fairfield Residential is one step closer to paperless operations.

Moyers says, “Work orders are now primarily managed and completed from the app and not printed at all, which has been a big part of our offices going paperless.”

For more information on Voyager 7S, join a webinar.