Business Intelligence

Delivered by Yardi

By Lee Ann Stiff on Oct 3, 2016 in Technology

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 integrated with Voyager and all ancillary products and services offered in the Yardi suites. Scheuerman enthused, “We also use RentCafe CRM and it’s great that Orion and CRM are integrated, which is so helpful as we start building our dashboards and getting metrics for deals. With Orion, we can meet every team member’s needs. And all the data feeds back into Voyager with the security we set.”

According to Kolb, the owner of A.J. Dwoskin is “a heavy iPad user” and now displays reports to owners on his mobile device — instead of asking his team for printed Excel reports to carry with him that would require talking through.

Kolb concluded, “With Orion, we aren’t just preparing data anymore. We’re reacting to it. We’re looking at our KPIs and making business decisions based on good data.”

To learn more about how Orion can improve your portfolio reporting and business decisions, register for a webinar.