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...

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...