From Time Consuming to Streamlined, Expedited & Polished.
Challenge
Colliers EPS had a major problem with their internal inspection process for evaluating potential property acquisitions pre-purchase, also known as their PCARs (Property Condition Assessment Report):
- PCARs involve a time-intensive process, removing the highly-skilled facility management teams from their primary roles in order to conduct the evaluations.
- The process is very manual and not standardized - their teams walk the property, taking photos and recording information on paper.
- The teams then bring those hard copies and photos back to the office where a project coordinator literally cut and paste the pieces together into a report. This process could take as long as two weeks.
According to Colliers EPS Project Manager, Neal Gupta, “Our team was spending significant time both in the field and office with our PCARs, and this former process was very manual.”
Furthermore, not only did this highly-manual process consume precious time from the facility managers and project coordinators, it greatly reduced the number of properties that Colliers could evaluate for purchase, thus impeding the growth of their portfolio in a competitive marketplace.
Lastly, the process was static and non-transferable. Information gathered could not be easily accessed for editing or further needs, in an easy and efficient manner.
Solution
To address these challenges, Colliers EPS adopted the One Spot property management tool, a software platform with both app-based and web-based offerings. Facility and property managers utilize the app on their mobile phones to geo-tag and photograph points of interest as they walk the property. They also record their notes and other information about the points - measurements, service line, priority, etc. - right on the app, in the field. As soon as that information is captured in the field, it is immediately available to the project coordinator back in the office on his desktop - no need to bring paper and pictures back to the office. This real-time, dynamic functionality is not only easy to learn, but also saves time and money.
“One Spot has allowed us to review and provide property condition reports for multiple locations for our clients in a much more streamlined and expedited manner. This is especially true when our clients are looking at a portfolio of properties rather than just one asset,” states Vice-President and EPS leader Tim Jackson, who is responsible for executing the PCARs assessments when Colliers is considering purchasing a new property for their portfolio.
Benefit
One Spot saved the Colliers EPS team significant time and money. On average, time to complete an assessment decreased from 40 total hours to approximately 6 hours. Likewise, the Colliers team realized a significant savings per assessment of $654 dollars. These results were generated from research that tracked a series of assessments (PCARs) in 2017 by Tim Jackson’s Minneapolis-based team. Lastly, onboarding for the field engineers and technicians took less than one hour.
One Spot provides the project manager with a robust and powerful report generation tool to create a highly-professional PCARs reports to be shared with management, the property owner and other key stakeholders. The project manager can customize the look and feel of the report as much as necessary, resulting in a “high-gloss” professional document in hours - not weeks.
The reporting tool also features integrated photo evidence and detail documentation. Neal Gupta further elaborates, “the automatic formatting provided by the photo integration feature saves significant time by eliminating the need to copy and paste each individual photo. This is particularly important when assessment reports include hundreds of geo-tagged points, many with multiple photos.”
Needless to say, the efficient reporting tool presents a compelling resource for negotiation. “The ability to gather information and turn data into a real document that a client can use to assess an asset in a much quicker timeline could mean the difference of winning or losing that asset,” explained Tim.
“The One Spot app was a nearly seamless process from start to finish in helping to generate the comprehensive inspection report needed. Their professional services team was able to create a customized template within a few hours to have all I needed to prepare my report. The execution process diminished to a single business day versus what was previously a two week process.”
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