How can business intelligence (BI) software provide insightful data? Our resourceful infographic has the answers, painting a detailed picture of BI and its benefits. We’re here to share it with you. Keep reading to discover why a BI solution like Senior IQ uncovers the information needed to make smarter, faster decisions — and drive growth in your communities. Data scattered across siloed systems leads to incorrect, outdated information Senior living business intelligence is crucial for today’s providers. But disparate systems don’t compare to a single connected solution. And our infographic has the research to match. According to BI-Survey, out of companies drawing data from disparate sources, only 5% report having no significant problems. A centralized business intelligence solution is key By accessing data from a single and accurate source, senior living providers can steer their communities forward. But what are the specific benefits? How can a single connected solution transform your business? For starters, a centralized BI solution helps providers … Streamline operationsMeasure successSave timeMinimize risksEmpower staffImprove resident care Not convinced? Take a look at the findings shared directly in the infographic. But while you’re here, we’ll point to a few: 54% of enterprises say BI is critical or very important to their current and future strategies, according to ForbesFinances Online reports that companies with CEOs that spearhead data-driven decisions are 77% more likely to achieve business goals64% of users reported that BI data helped improve their efficiency, says Finances Online Transform your business with Yardi Senior IQ Senior IQ is a single connected BI solution designed for the unique needs of senior living providers. With this specialized system, you’ll gain access to … Real-time reports and dashboards450+ pre-configured KPIs plus custom optionsInternal benchmarks and industry comparison dataPrecise insights for presenting to investors or...
BI for Senior Living
Webinar Recap
What are the benefits of business intelligence in senior living? How can providers, investors and other leaders choose the right BI solution? These questions were answered in a recent webinar with Yardi and McKnight’s Senior Living — Differentiators in Business Intelligence Technology. The June webinar gathered Yardi clients Trey Allen of Dominion Senior Living and Michael Bowles of Dial Senior Living, with discussions led by Yardi Marketing Campaigns Specialist Rochelle Throckmorton. The panel also featured Yardi Associate Technical Account Manager Chris Golden. The panel started with an in-depth look at business intelligence, moving into the tools and tips needed to select an effective BI solution. Attendees then heard insights from Allen and Bowles, who explained the challenges their communities faced before adopting BI tools. They continued by sharing their firsthand experience implementing Yardi Senior IQ — a single connected BI solution — describing how it’s transformed their operations for the better. Here’s a highlight: Throckmorton: How does Senior IQ help you and your team? Allen: Yardi Senior IQ has been very helpful to our team here at Dominion Senior Living, mainly in the way of convenience. A lot of business intelligence information can be arranged on a single screen — from community management information to marketing or EHR — and the financial information, too. We no longer have to pull 8 different reports. Rent roll, trial balance, trend activity and incident reports — it can all be arranged on one dashboard. Plus it has graphs, tables and comparisons. It’s very helpful and expedient. Throckmorton: How much time is saved when using business intelligence tools? Allen: The time saving is in the convenience. Our community management and financial team members were having to run 8 different reports each month, all to see the same...
Smarter Decisions
New BI Tool for Senior Living
Good leadership depends on good data. Because without data, as the saying goes, you’re just another person with an opinion. Thing is, everyone wants good data for making better business decisions. But not everyone wants to collect, clean, graph and dissect their datasets. Part of the issue is the sheer abundance of information, especially in senior living. From your standard financial metrics to qualitative measures like care level, there’s always something extra to track down. Some staff may not even know where to find the right numbers in the first place. Then there’s the lack of clarity. How do you accurately organize and analyze what you have? Giant spreadsheets of columns and rows are not the easiest to understand, nor are they very shareable. The current state of senior living business intelligence It’s a tricky situation that senior living providers have approached in a couple ways. Manually creating reports: The most common method. You (or your staff) spend days’ worth of preparation before big meetings, pulling numbers from siloed systems, cutting and pasting inside spreadsheets. When you have monthly or even weekly calls that require up-to-date numbers, this is a significant time sink. Adapting third-party tools: Today’s business intelligence software options are powerful, but they are general-purpose tools. Which means long implementation and customization, trying to fit the product to senior living. Some organizations even require a dedicated full-time employee to manually upload data and manage the solution. Thankfully, the future of business intelligence in senior living looks brighter. Introducing a smarter solution for senior living data analytics Your data is now open for business. Make smarter, faster decisions with actionable information for your entire portfolio through Yardi Senior IQ. Designed specifically for senior living providers, Senior IQ surfaces your data in dashboards, tiles...
NAA 2018
Lessons from Apartmentalize
The multifamily industry converged in San Diego last week for Apartmentalize Powered by National Apartment Association. Formerly known as the NAA Education Conference and Exposition, the annual event is the largest educational conference for apartment industry professionals. We highlight five of our favorite lessons from this year’s event. 5 Lessons from Apartmentalize 2018: Own the Age of AI On Thursday, industry experts discussed the impact of artificial intelligence in multifamily. Panelists included Dawn Wise from Berkshire Communities, Michael Barry from Bozzuto, Tim Reardon from Bridge Property Management, and Yardi’s Dhar Sawh. Artificial intelligence has just recently emerged in the rental housing industry. “This is so new for our industry, so the sky’s the limit,” explained Reardon. The session explored the benefits of artificial intelligence, big data, and business intelligence tools. How can you get energized for the Age of AI? Top tips from panelists: learn more about AI, and make a data strategy plan. Today’s Renters Have a Multi-Touch Journey Over the last two decades, we’ve gone from tracking walk-ins and phone calls to embracing comprehensive CRM systems. On a panel moderated by Yardi’s Esther Bonardi, Holli Beckman from WC Smith, Israel Carunungan from Greystar, and Mia Wentworth from CWS Apartment Homes discussed multi-touch lead attribution, a model for tracking and weighing touchpoints in the lead-to-lease cycle. How can smart marketers improve lead tracking? “Dig into it, study it, and it can open a whole new world,” advised Bonardi. Learn more about multi-touch lead attribution and download our free eBook. Sustainability Wins At Friday’s Apartmentalize session, panelists including Yardi’s Martin Levkus explored resident engagement through energy efficiency. In a recent National Apartment Association survey, windows were the top sustainability item residents cared about. For one panelist, energy efficient windows resulted in a $75 per month...
Creating Value
Client Success with Yardi Orion
“Yardi Orion is the tool that helps us create value for our clients,” said Jeanette Ruscitti, vice president of operations for The REMM Group. REMM is a third-party fee manager with more than 5,000 multifamily units and 1.5 million square feet of commercial space across Southern California. REMM takes a hands-on approach, working with its executive and onsite teams to go “above and beyond” for its clients — and investing in technology is key to the company’s success. Yardi Orion Business Intelligence is a mobile-enabled platform that combines financial, operational and ancillary services data from Yardi Voyager to deliver holistic portfolio insight. With configurable dashboards and more than 200 key performance indicators, Orion provides flexible reporting that enables REMM and its clients to make fast and informed business decisions. Shawn Conerty, REMM’s chief financial officer, said, “We have used Yardi Voyager software for years and find it is the most advanced property SaaS platform available. Our teams are empowered by the centralized source of data and automated workflows that simplify operations from leasing through move-ins and move-outs, work orders, purchase orders, check writing and more. Yardi’s marketing and leasing tools, including RentCafe, make life easier for our prospects, residents and staff with online leasing, rent payments and maintenance requests.” Conerty commented that REMM came to the table to analyze Orion with these previous Yardi successes in mind. “Orion draws from all the flows of information that go through those Yardi systems: occupancy, delinquency, exceptions, marketing, financials, etc.,” he added. Built right into its Voyager platform, Orion has proven to be the right choice for REMM to serve its clients and meet business goals, with mobile access that makes it easy for REMM’s executives to utilize the system on the go. Real-time tracking of rental...
CRE Tech Trends
Teel Talks at Realcomm
Rob Teel, senior vice president of global solutions for Yardi, offered perspective on new tools that help commercial real estate companies gather, analyze and use data in new ways in an interview at the Realcomm conference in San Diego. Guided by collaboration with clients and industry trends, Yardi is directing its product development beyond traditional accounting and back office systems. “Most transactions, such as purchase orders by employees and work orders by tenants, start in the field and usually on a mobile platform. We want to continue pushing ERP upstream to the source of transactions, and capture data that goes to the general ledger from the first transaction,” Teel explained. He cited COMMERCIALCafé Tenant, a downloadable app that extends online services to mobile devices, as an example of this effort. VENDORCafé, which automates manual processing involved in validating and onboarding vendors, also offers secure, mobile access to the ERP. Teel also mentioned the investments Yardi has made, through acquisitions and development, to develop a comprehensive energy offering that includes intelligent HVAC optimization, submeter-level usage analysis and fault detection. With these capabilities in hand, Yardi now focuses on putting them together as “a holistic offering that helps clients reduce their energy spend and promote sustainability,” he said. He also discussed Yardi Matrix in terms of the artificial intelligence and guided analytics trends that were popular topics of discussion at Realcomm. For years Yardi Matrix has been gathering information on commercial, multifamily and self storage facilities across the U.S. The challenge now, Teel said, is to “use that repository of information about leases, rental rates and other characteristics to help clients make smart decisions about pricing properties, forecasting budgets and reporting to analysts and stakeholders,” Teel said. Extending Yardi Matrix beyond data capture and leveraging the...
Smarter than Ever
Yardi Business Intelligence
By consolidating portfolio-wide data and automating reporting, Yardi Orion Business Intelligence makes life a lot easier for property managers and executive decision makers. Instead of manually compiling spreadsheets that can be difficult to analyze, Orion users can instantly view a single dashboard with comprehensive performance data on their desktop or mobile device. Now, with updates made available in V10, there are more advanced tools, enhanced features and simplified ways to get the powerful data you need, precisely when you need it, wherever you happen to be. Lisa Kolb, consulting systems analyst at A.J. Dwoskin, summed up the efficiency of Orion, “People get stuck in ‘analysis paralysis’ when they review too many reports. With Orion, we’ve cleaned up the dashboard and focus on our KPIs on a screen with drilldown capabilities — instead of sending out a bunch of reports. It’s been well accepted in our organization from day one.” Here are some highlights of what’s new in Orion: Tiles: For both administrators and users, tiles have been completely redesigned to display more information. Along with the primary measure selected, now tiles can show up to four additional measures, with KPIs and optional trend comparisons. You can also control and link timeframes to the dashboard filter. With a new customization capability, you can add subcategories to your tiles. Widgets: A simplified widget toolbar features icons for each option. Enhanced widgets now allow you to filter through specific KPIs and manage by exception. New grid widget functionality includes a reference point to date controls, and allows you to view up to 50 rows per page. Newly added widgets show KPIs for multiple measures. KPIs: KPIs have evolved as well, and can now vary by just about any attribute you select including property, regional manager and metropolitan...
Business Intelligence
Delivered by Yardi
Yardi’s holistic portfolio insight tool, Yardi Orion Business Intelligence, helps owners and managers improve business performance with actionable data derived from their combined financial, operational and ancillary services information. Orion is a mobile-friendly platform that works with any browser to deliver robust reporting and dashboards to tablets. With 24/7 convenience, the solution lets clients create flexible views of property and resident data housed in Yardi Voyager through an intuitive tablet touch interface with the same customized reporting they can generate on a desktop computer. Meet the Clients We met up with a few Yardi clients at YASC earlier this year to find out how Orion is working for them. Norma Soria is systems director for Cesar Chavez Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides new and rehabilitated high-quality affordable housing in four states for farm workers and other low-income Latino families. Sandy Scheuerman is vice president of technology for First Potomac Realty Trust, a self-managed REIT that focuses on owning, operating, and redeveloping office and business park properties in the Washington, D.C. region. Lisa Kolb serves as consulting senior systems analyst for A.J. Dwoskin, a leader in both commercial and residential property management with 28 apartment, town home, mobile home, and commercial properties throughout Northern Virginia. Why Orion Business Intelligence? With a toolset that builds reporting content focused on the metrics each client needs to run their business, Orion helps drive timely and profitable decisions. Orion also supports paperless initiatives by delivering reports electronically. Eliminating spreadsheets not only reduces costs and saves time, but it also minimizes errors. According to Scheuerman, “We wanted to replace a third-party reporting tool and needed a solution integrated with our Voyager property management and accounting database. We’re a REIT, with a lot of Excel-driven financial staff — we sought a product that was easy for them to use. So when we started with Orion our focus was on the backend and being able to connect Excel info to the database. It’s been great. We were able to get rid of that third-party tool.” Soria said, “We have financial data and monthly reporting to prepare. We always complained about how long it took to do that manually — Orion enables us to be much more efficient. It’s the easiest tool I’ve ever used.” Kolb explained, “We were moving to a new office and were implementing paperless solutions. Orion is the tool we chose to eliminate distribution of paper reports. We are hyper-focused on KPIs and now, in this world where we collect a ton of data, looking at the most important analytics to make business decisions is paramount. People get stuck in ‘analysis paralysis’ when they review too many reports. With Orion, we’ve cleaned up the dashboard and focus on our KPIs on a screen with drilldown capabilities — instead of sending out a bunch of reports. It’s been well accepted in our organization from day one.” Benefits By consolidating portfolio-wide data and automating reporting, Orion makes life a lot easier for property managers and executive decision makers. Instead of hunting down information and manually compiling spreadsheets that can be difficult to analyze, Orion users can instantly view a single dashboard with comprehensive performance data. Soria commented, “We had reports that were Excel-driven with charts, and basically what we were doing was cutting and pasting and it took a long time. Our weekly operations meetings used to take about four hours, and everyone had different reports to share. With Orion, we only need half that amount of time with our regionals all on the same call, reviewing the same information. The preparation for those meetings is simple now. We used to start getting information together up to three days in advance, but now we can run specific reports with Orion a few hours before the meeting. We just log in, go to the dashboard, and everything we need to review is right there.” Orion is seamlessly...
Operational Efficiency
Cost Savings, Automation with Orion BI
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...
Orion Arrives!
Brings better business solutions
The much-anticipated arrival of Yardi System’s latest platform, Yardi Orion for SharePoint, was announced Thursday, March 15 to great excitement both company and industry wide. You can read all the details about the release and Orion’s fantastic business intelligence capabilities on yardi.com, but here are a few of the highlights about this new software as a service and what it can do for you: -Offers a great solution for business intelligence. Rather than contracting to an outside vendor for an over-reaching data warehousing project, clients using Yardi Orion can maximize the potential of their existing data resources via Orion’s use of data warehousing and easy extraction of the data via SharePoint. Read more about the data extraction in our recent Balance Sheet article. -Makes SharePoint a more effective tool for real estate enterprise. It’s been around for over 10 years, but Microsoft’s SharePoint platform gains great functionality as a business enterprise platform through Orion. Important security features and industry-specific applications are among Orion’s many exceptional offerings. -Customized access for all kinds of users. Your business has so many vested participants – from entry-level employees to upper level management, from tenants to vendors to prospects to managers. All need access to different sections of vital information. Orion will allow customized portal access to the right pieces of data for the appropriate user. Let’s open it up for discussion. Are you excited about the release of Yardi Orion? What business solutions will it help you...
