JLL Technologies
Helping CREs bring their Enterprise Ambitions to Life

The workplace is changing. The mindset of today’s employees is blending the lines between work and personal environments to maximize wellbeing and being mindful about balancing their work-life. And, owing to the convenience offered by connected technologies, every organization is striving to create a digital workplace with a surefire culture of engagement.

At this juncture, Michael Ewert, global head of data and analytics solutions at JLL Technologies, believes, “Digital workplaces are not only about equipping work desks, managing resources, and aiding collaboration.” According to him, digital workplaces are moving toward connecting people with spaces they work in and their enterprise. And, to make that happen, data is the secret harpoon of success. This is where Ewert’s company, JLL Technologies, showcases its expertise through and through. Notably, JLL is a leading authority in commercial real estate (CRE) technology. The company offers mission-ready intuitive business intelligence-based (BI) products to reinforce analytics-driven decision-making processes and support real estate enterprises to conduct their CRE operations better.

Today, JLL’s expertise is further strengthened with significant investments in real estate technology including the successful acquisitions of BRG and ValuD, both leading providers of workplace technology solutions, along with investing upto $100m in JLL Spark, a Global PropTech Venture Fund. With such extended capabilities, JLL focuses on using the data produced in any client’s workspace to derive valuable insights that complement the capabilities of JLL’s BI Solutions. JLL also adopts stringent data management practices toward achieving the perfect data consistency to provide clients with consultation services, among the other extensive CRE technology services. What’s more, Ewert and his team of data experts possess a deep understanding of the operational intricacies of the real estate marketplace. This helps JLL innovate and deliver solutions that protect its clients from existing as well as predicted challenges.

What makes the company a cut above the rest is its efforts inimbuing CRE technology with the highest levels of usability and agility to solve the most pressing transformation, integration, and optimization challenges. Further, to support and enable such flexibility, JLL leverages a wide range of DW/ BI technologies, including Tableau, Alteryx, Snowflake, Apache Kafka, and Azure/AWS technology stack. “We follow a design thinking methodology to curate products around a client’s needs iteratively, and Agile project management techniques to deliver a completely functional solution in short delivery cycles,” explains Ewert.

Digital workplaces are not only about equipping work desks, managing resources, and aiding collaboration

And, to bolster the competency of their offerings, the company’s meticulous choice of BI technologies supports the ease of use and flexibility that clients desire. JLL also employs a series of customer-centric strategies to identify clients’ underlying problems—a unique characteristic that stems from the company’s comprehensive understanding of the new, growing real estate niche on a global scale.

To further elaborate on the company’s CRE capabilities, Ewert shares the story of a global real estate company, where its C-suite leadership team was unable to review key data points about their property portfolio in a timely manner. “The client found it difficult to obtain relevant insights about total costs and lease transaction activities among other parameters that affected fundamental business operations,” he adds. Owing to massive amounts of data entering the client’s systems from multiple vendors and tools, there were no clear pathways to connect data across the enterprise. Additionally, the existence of inconsistent data standards and models exacerbated the situation. JLL helped the client by successfully conducting a data integration project, which set uniform data standards throughout the enterprise and designed a new model to combine relevant data for optimized portfolio management. “We also developed a set of analytics tools and applications to meet the client’s end-users needs,” says Ewert.

Paying attention to such intricate details, and married with the ingenuity of real estate experience, JLL is now assuming the role of a leader in the CRE arena. Moving forward, the company intends to delve deeper into data and analytics innovation for better real estate-based decision-making processes. In first half 2020, JLL Technologies will unveil the launch of new market-leading BI services bringing together their learnings and expertise in data integration, design interface and delivering all the key business insights across all aspects of their clients’ real estate business challenges.

These continual efforts made by JLL have shown promise thus far, and the world is set to witness new applications of BI in the real estate marketplace.