By Scott Reid
Manhattan Software, a provider of Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS), recently released Manhattan Analytics (MA), making it available to over 500 corporate clients in the industrial, financial, technology, media, healthcare and energy sectors in 140 countries on five continents. Nearly half of the company’s client base resides within the Fortune 1000. CIO Review ranked Manhattan Analytics among the top 100 data-analytics advances of 2014 for all industries.
Craig Gillespie, CEO of Manhattan Software, explains that Manhattan Analytics is the first CRE enterprise system to offer comparative analytical capabilities. “Manhattan Analytics solves a long-running need where we allow all opt-in clients to benchmark against a database of peer organizations in real time on an aggregated level,” he says. “The benchmarking is tied to multinational organizations that are already Manhattan Software clients, so they can leverage higher ROI on their Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) and IWMS investments with Manhattan Analytics.”
Without platforms like MA, companies would be severely hampered by a lack of transparency that is critical for well-informed management of their real estate portfolios. That’s because IWMS- and CAFM-based systems that drive MA in real time have information detailing location, occupancy, space utilization, lease terms, size, total cost of occupancy and trending of value versus cost by building. These are often used as indicators to determine outcomes like productivity, speed-to-market and competitive advantage.
There’s evidence to support this. The number 1 trend cited in a recent JLL forecast on 14 workplace trends for 2014 is 3D visualization of facilities by interoperable databases and systems from within corporate-client real estate portfolios.
According to Gillespie, Manhattan has raised the visibility of IWMS to the level of ERP enterprise-level systems, a significant development considering how facility and workplace performance are now tied to organizational performance and, of course, big data analytics.
REBusinessOnline.com sat down with Gillespie to better understand some of the strategy and benefits behind Manhattan Analytics, which he views as effective leverage for “CRE’s new Moneyball: big data analytics.”
REBO: With more than three decades in the industry, the Manhattan Software Group has established itself as one of the largest privately owned companies specializing in the global development, implementation and support of fully integrated property, asset and facility management systems. What were the challenges faced by the company on its way up?
Craig Gillespie: Honestly, our biggest challenge in growing our business was technology adoption and the appreciation for enterprise-level systems in real estate and facility management departments.
Real estate portfolios represent as much as 10 percent of operating costs and 40 percent of the balance sheets for large organizations.
Despite the amounts of money spent on real estate each year, the market was slow to adopt technology. The amount of money in corporate real estate is staggering. And as technology was adopted, the first wave was to implement lower end point solutions. It was not until the last five years or so when companies started to realize the value of having integrated technology solutions where they could manage their demand and supply in one system that also manages all the operational aspects of real estate and facilities.
Properly managed real estate organizations with the right IWMS technology can drive significant real estate portfolio savings. We just had one of our clients – a top three global bank – report an 1,800 percent ROI in just two years.
REBO: You are named as a leading provider of integrated workplace management systems and you have a comprehensive set of solutions for it. Can you elaborate on the solutions? Is there any particular product that you want to focus on more?
Gillespie: Manhattan has long been considered the leading provider of IWMS solutions due to the breadth and depth of the solutions we provide. We are recognized as a “leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IWMS.
Most pertinent to this discussion is our Manhattan Analytics solution that was launched in 2013 and updated again in May 2014. It is the first portfolio analytics and benchmarking product offering of its kind for corporate real estate.
There are annual surveys and studies that organizations can participate in, but what we are offering is true real-time benchmarking. It allows organizations to view the data on each of the buildings in their portfolios on visual maps or charts and quickly understand the areas of their portfolios that need to be optimized for cost efficiencies and greater resource effectiveness.
REBO: Manhattan Analytics reduces costs and improves efficiencies by understanding historic trends and the existing state of a building’s performance. What kind of data do you have to deal with here?
Gillespie: The data includes information on location, occupancy, utilization, lease terms, size, total cost of occupancy and trending by building.
REBO: In cases of big data, do you have your own team to analyze the same?
Gillespie: The Manhattan Analytics team is headed by John Serri, Ph.D, who is a data scientist and faculty member of the International Institute for Analytics, which also includes the big data/analytics guru Tom Davenport. John has a team of people who are data analysts, technologists, as well as experts in facility management and corporate real estate. The whole team has been working closely with our clients in the design phase of the project as a virtual collaboration group to create Manhattan Analytics in an agile development environment.
REBO: Tell us about IWMS as a tool that provides facility managers with a technology to effectively and efficiently plan, manage and operate their building and site portfolios. How is the tool automated and planned as per client needs?
Gillespie: In most cases, in addition to being integrated with other systems like ERP, CAD, GIS and BIM, the IWMS system is updated when a new person is hired, terminated or changes location as part of a move from one space to another. In the more advanced implementations today, reservation systems, sensors and badges monitor usage of the different types of spaces in a building by employees, consultants or visitors.
REBO: What is the primary industry that you focus upon when you think about real estate and facility management systems and how strong is your client base?
Gillespie: Real estate is ubiquitous and is not specific to any particular industry as managing workspaces is critical to all, whether the client is an educational, manufacturing, corporate (i.e. financial, technological, pharma/biotech, insurance, etc.), retail, transportation, oil and gas, governmental or institutional organization around the world.
We segment our market differently – normally by scale as opposed to industry. For instance, the challenges a corporate real estate executive in an insurance company deals with are often the same as in a technology company. When we look at scale we tend to serve clients with more than 1 million square feet of space with 200-plus locations. That is not to say we do not serve below that market, but our clients tend to be on the larger size.
REBO: What would you identify as the key differentiating factors for Manhattan Software? And what is your strategy to stay ahead of competition?
Gillespie: Manhattan is focused on client success. Manhattan is solely focused on serving the needs of the corporate real estate/ facilities technology market. We have had this focus for over 30 yearsand can boast of a client retention rate north of 98 percent.
Many of our clients date back to the first years we founded the business. Without the need for outside investors we can stay focused on the long-term success of our clients. We take this position to the extreme and have programs where clients directly control a significant portion of our R&D dollars, which get invested into our core technology each year.
Commitment to providing the best products in the market remains our hallmark. Manhattan invests 25 percent of our gross revenues back into the product on an annual basis and we have done so since starting the business. This allows us to deliver the most advanced technologies to the marketplace, like we did when we launched Manhattan Analytics in 2013.
Manhattan’s products have the broadest and deepest functionality in the real estate and facility management market, with a key focus on financial accountability and strategic planning.
REBO: Can we discuss a case study of when your solutions and analytics expertise successfully addressed a customer’s pain point?
Gillespie: One of our global technology clients’ CEO created a new integrated operating plan in February that called for a more agile, connected and execution-oriented company, which required streamlining the business portfolio and lowering operating costs.
The corporate real estate and facility management group joined the Manhattan Analytics Early Adopter Program to collaborate on the creation of the new service offering. They have successfully used it on a daily basis to uncover major inefficiencies in their real estate portfolio and were able to create scenarios to better deploy resources for a savings of ten hours a week in analytic data processing time and to shave off $14 million in costs.
REBO: What is Manhattan Software’s roadmap for the coming years?
Gillespie: At Manhattan, we pride ourselves on being the most innovative technology company in our sector. With the ever-changing definition of “workplace,” we are constantly evaluating the market needs of today and where we see them moving in three to five years.
The market is shifting to one that needs real-time information whenever and wherever professionals may be working and on whatever device they may be using at the time. Not only do they want it now, but they demand it to be completely accurate and validated, no longer in a vacuum, and they yearn for peer validation – benchmarking.
This is why what we are doing with Manhattan Analytics and our big data push is gaining so much traction. In the coming years we will explore predictive analytics and optimization in our plans for subsequent releases.
REBO: In closing, how would you describe Manhattan Software’s way of differentiating itself in the corporate end-user marketplace?
Gillespie: Manhattan Software has successfully developed an entrepreneurial culture through Manhattan Analytics using our collaboration with clients to develop an agile prototype and then roll it out.
This methodology has worked so successfully that we will be using the same model to bring new products to market at a faster rate and in a new paradigm. Rather than “build it and they will come,” we are “building it with them” in a collaborative team effort. It is a new way of working and I am delighted to be leading this new effort for Manhattan Software.