Manhattan Software Group: Manhattan Software Merging Big Data into Real Estate

Despite the amount of money spent on real estate portfolios of large organizations each year, the market has been on a passive mode to adopt technology to manage their buildings and sites. It was not until the last five years when companies started to realize the value of having integrated technology solutions where they could manage the demand, supply and all the operational aspects of real estate and facilities in one system.

“The biggest challenge in growing our business was technology adoption and the appreciation for enterprise level systems in real estate and facility management departments,” says Craig Gillespie, CEO, Manhattan Software. Overcoming these challenges, Manhattan Software has established itself as one among the largest privately owned company specializing in the global development, implementation and support of fully-integrated real estate, asset and facility management systems.

Manhattan’s Analytics solution claims to be the first true portfolio analytics and benchmarking product offering for making decisions on real estate and facility management. With a unique blend of data populated by Manhattan’s and IWMS solution, which includes information on occupancy, utilization, portfolio size, total cost of occupancy by building—Manhattan Analytics presents this information visually on maps and in charts. It allows organizations to quickly understand the areas which need to be optimized for cost efficiencies and greater resource effectiveness. The Manhattan Analytics solution creates knowledge from real estate and facility management information for industry executives to make critical decisions about their property and building portfolios. “There are annual surveys and studies that organizations can participate in to gather knowledge, but what we are offering is true real time benchmarking,” says, Gillespie.

Manhattan Analytics solution is designed with a select group of clients in an agile development process. What the clients required was that it can receive data the moment it is turned on and the real estate and facility executive can immediately have the information needed to make key decisions on the portfolio.

A dedicated data analytics team consisting of data scientists, analysts, technologists as well as experts in facility management and real estate has created the Manhattan’s Analytics solutions. The team works closely with the early adopter clients in the design phase of the project as a virtual collaboration group to create this unique service offering. With its client-centric attitude and commitment to providing satisfying products, the company has watched its clients get immediate benefits.

For instance, one of Manhattan’s global technology clients’ CEO created a new integrated operating plan 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, which enabled them to uncover major inefficiencies in the real estate portfolio. With Manhattan, the client was able to create scenarios to better deploy resources for a savings of ten hours a week in analytic data processing time and shaving off $20 million in occupancy costs.

Going forward, with the ever-changing definition of “workplace” Manhattan Software is constantly evaluating the market needs. “In the coming years we will explore predictive analytics and optimization in our plans for subsequent releases,” says Gillespie. The company is also planning to implement their successful methodology of “building it with clients” in a collaborative team effort on new products and services that they wish to introduce into the market.