Fluidra was already reviewing their e-commerce platform as they recognized the need for modernization to future-proof their business. They also had existing latency and network bandwidth issues due to their ERP-centric architecture. The tight coupling with their ERP systems meant that they were limited in their ability to modernize their front-end applications, making any digital transformation or migration to the cloud challenging. The ERP systems were developed with legacy software and architectures which were difficult to maintain and modernize. In addition, the performance suffered, and they were unable to meet their service level agreements. The pandemic further highlighted that the existing digital platform was single-function/siloed, becoming out-of-date, and not capable of handling huge spikes in user traffic. The stark reminder became evident with the significant increase in pool use during lockdown compounded with the closure of popular sales channels like their brick-and-mortar, face-to-face business. As a result, the only channel for purchasing items was the e-commerce platform, and the increased online workload became more difficult to support. The pandemic thus forced them to accelerate their upgrade effort and shorten their implementation window from 2 years down to 8 months.

It was clear from the start that the development of HPD Lendscape would need a solution that was able to continuously process high volumes of data as fast as possible. The solution also needed to be scalable so that it could accommodate all sizes of factoring solutions. Reliability was of course a critical factor and having downtime was not an option. To support their agile teams, the solution needed to be easy to understand, build, and deploy. In addition, the application has evolved to use the Spring Framework as well as other widely adopted frameworks in order to better support the future maintainability of the application. As the market has evolved and adapted to changing technologies, so too has HPD Lendscape’s solution. The most recent evolution has focused on cloud adoption and to this end, HPD Lendscape is able to host on AWS and Azure. Initially, Ehcache was used as the in-memory solution deployed for Lendscape and it has continued to prove sufficient for single-server deployment. However, to provide solutions for the future that allows for scalable multi-node deployment, they needed a caching solution that would support real-time transactions, with very high throughput and low latency and would run continuously without service outages.

The bank was looking to expand their online payments business, but was hampered by the inflexibility of their existing solution. The existing application architecture could not scale up to meet the demand of larger customers that could unlock the highest potential return on their technology investments. In addition, the legacy code was difficult to extend and evolve, so that adding new features or adapting to facilitate entry into new markets could not be done in a timely fashion - release cycles of the monolithic application were generally six months in duration. One of the client banks in Hong Kong had a requirement for a 50x increase in transaction speed, so this became one of the criteria for evaluating the performance of the solution. Even if large investments were made in upgrading the hardware environment for the application, the bank was doubtful that such an improvement would be possible with the existing software architecture.

The effort for developing a timetable solution for railways is a well-studied science, but still not an easy one. It is not a problem that has been completely solved at the scale to which SBB aspires, despite much research and many discussions with other railways and academics. Making it automated via high-performance computations would make it much more efficient. But as one of the densest railways in the world, SBB had many different route combinations to consider, making their planning effort a very large number-crunching problem. The SBB IT team currently uses their computer systems to incorporate extra trains in their current daily timetable and plans to calculate timetables for an entire day algorithmically. This is a huge step forward, as the construction of a valid timetable was a time-consuming effort, even for seasoned timetable planners. Additionally, the manual construction of the timetable is an error-prone task that can lead to plans which often do not work out in practice, causing delays and additional work for the train operation teams. Now that the construction of the timetable can be automated, the planners can concentrate on evaluating different timetable options produced by the computer. A key to optimize this process is fast access to the computed timetable data, so that they can produce the commercially best timetable fast.

The business challenge they faced was to increase the adoption of its products to its customer base. The bank’s marketing team identified a set of responses to specific customer situations, which would result in an offer for an upsell/cross-sell product. One straightforward offer would be to promote personal loans to any customer whose bank account balance was low and could not provide the requested amount of cash via an ATM. The “error” notification was captured by the bank, so it was theoretically easy to quickly respond with the right offer to the customer. The marketing team expected that a timelier response would be advantageous for increasing customer conversions, so they turned to the IT team for help. The team had built an elaborate architecture consisting of a services-oriented architecture (SOA) and an enterprise service bus (ESB) that drove data flows across the bank’s operations. All client-facing and back-office applications were linked via the SOA bus. This architecture was the backbone of their IT infrastructure and had been operating very reliably for the bank for several years. Similar to their previous use cases that incorporated Hazelcast, they wanted to retain all of the existing work, and only add components where necessary to add new business capabilities. This was important to ensure they added no major risk of disruption to their existing operations, considering that everything was already working well. However, the batch-oriented infrastructure based on CRM and data warehouse technology meant that it would typically take up to two days to present the customer with an offer. This would not meet the marketing team’s requirements on timely responsiveness.

The BNP Paribas IT team faced two major challenges. First, they needed to migrate customer data from a newly acquired bank into their central core banking system within a narrow time frame. This involved not only moving large volumes of data but also ensuring data integrity through a reconciliation process. The second challenge was to develop a new architecture to support their Internet banking initiative without disrupting the already reliable core banking systems. This required high performance and scalability to meet customer expectations for online banking services.

With an extensive portfolio of properties, HBOS faced significant challenges in allocating and tracking space usage on a daily basis. The company, being the UK's largest mortgage and savings provider and a leading general insurer, required innovative solutions for its space management needs. A previous in-house attempt to develop a database for this purpose was found to be restrictive, costly, and eventually unsupported, necessitating the search for a more effective replacement.

The inability to quantify their space portfolio and automate rent allocation and tracking was a significant problem for Unum from a real estate perspective. Additionally, there were no common standards or audit ability for corrective and preventive maintenance work requests. The company realized it was time to automate its real estate and facilities management functions to eliminate manual facilities management practices based on data contained in Excel spreadsheets. This need for automation was driven by the large user base, continually expanding applications scope, and integration capabilities required to manage their extensive real estate portfolio effectively.

The story of Progressive Casualty Insurance’s implementation of ARCHIBUS is one of learning from challenges to achieve great success. When the company first adopted ARCHIBUS, the attempt wasn’t able to fully meet the customer’s needs due to a lack of customization, communication, and stakeholder involvement. However, the team at the Real Estate Department closely examined what had made the first project fail and used the lessons they learned to, subsequently, drive a stunningly successful implementation. Before implementing ARCHIBUS, Progressive Casualty used various internal systems to track building operations and accommodate work groups in the real estate organization. Employee moves, meanwhile, were managed on a third party platform. Progressive’s Real Estate Department decided that the company would benefit from a unified approach to building operations and turned to ARCHIBUS to supply this solution. The first project took a “one-size-fits-all” approach that didn’t initially meet the organization’s needs and created several hurdles that would need to be improved upon going forward. The initial project was also inhibited by a lack of communication and mistimed communication during implementation. For example, the staff was trained before the rollout to support the implementation but, by the time the project went live, they had forgotten what they learned, or were not as involved in the project. Additionally, due to project delays and deadlines, reporting options were not addressed that could save time and resources. As a result of these issues, the project did not meet key deadlines and the solution it provided was incomplete and did not match the company’s needs. Because of these issues, key stakeholders within the company found their old methods easier to understand and use than the new solution provided by ARCHIBUS.

NTU’s extensive portfolio of planted grounds, 16 residence halls, and numerous academic buildings meant that the school finally recognized that its leading-edge academics also required the introduction of a leading-edge, BIM-based solution to address NTU’s facilities management challenges. Central to that effort was the creation of NTU BIM models integrated with ARCHIBUS facilities management data to produce both 2D and 3D visualizations of its properties for more precise, proactive space, asset, and maintenance management. NTU was the first university in Singapore to adopt BIM technology for facility operation in response to a call by the Building Construction Authority (BCA) of Singapore to use BIM for building lifecycle management. In 2013, ARCHIBUS was chosen to help meet the BIM adoption objective because of its Enterprise Information Modelling (EIM) capability. BIM-enabled space planning was then implemented in the first phase of the project to better optimize space as a first step in achieving a range of project goals. Those goals also included the elimination of manual FM processes; more efficient generation of reports and room inventories; and improved leased space chargeback processes.

Caterpillar embarked on a multi-year, multi-location project to implement a world-class Enhanced 911 (E911) system at its facilities in Peoria, Illinois. The company aimed to improve emergency response times and collect more real-time occupancy data. The challenge was to integrate various systems and applications to ensure accurate and efficient emergency response and occupancy monitoring. The project had to comply with federal, state, and local requirements, including OSHA, ADA, and state-mandated E911 laws.

Every hospital faces the twin challenges of maintaining its facilities from both a strictly operational as well as regulatory compliance standpoint. The challenges just get bigger the larger the institution in question happens to be, and they don’t come much bigger – or better – than The Nebraska Medical Center (TNMC) in Omaha, Nebraska. TNMC, in fact, was recently named to the list of “100 Great Hospitals in America” by Becker’s Hospital Review.\n\nTNMC’s enviable reputation is supported in part by the expertise of that healthcare provider’s facilities department. The facilities team is responsible for a nearly 4 million square foot main campus with an additional 600,000+ square feet at other educational, hospital and clinic facilities in and around Omaha, points out Michelle Stalker, TNMC’s Senior Systems Engineer. That means placing added emphasis on preventive maintenance that complies with state and professional regulatory requirements.

Because of multiple, incompatible legacy IT systems and the extensive use of manual processes, GACA faced a number of challenges in the areas of facilities management and lease administration. The agency needed to centralize accurate space usage and categorization data, as well as link as-built drawings to the facilities management database. It also had to create a comprehensive lease management system that preserved legacy systems data and functionality while matching leases to actual space utilization. Additionally, it needed to automate the application of the Saudi Civil Aviation Tariff Law to its operations.

Wuhan Metro realized that its transportation system was growing faster than its ability to manage it cost-effectively. Among its problems were too much paper-based information that was difficult to store and search, inefficient work order management processes, slow response to facilities management issues, and manual data collection that resulted in unreliable data accuracy and reports. These deficiencies were problematic for the management of the company’s existing 80km of track and more than 65 stations that were in operation by 2014. The problem, however, would only get worse with the completion of the system, which would create a transportation network with an expected 333km of track and seven cross-river tunnels.

To maintain its dominant market share and position itself for the future and continued profitability, Türk Telekom embarked on a major facilities management software project to reduce costs in building operations and facility asset utilization. The project, started in November 2010, aimed to raise efficiency, modernize, and ensure transparency of its operations by streamlining business processes. The company needed to generate detailed reports for strategic decisions, plan and execute equipment, furniture, and asset moves efficiently, track location and depreciation of assets, and provide fully automated room and facilities reservations.

Enbridge Pipelines Inc. faced significant challenges due to rapid business growth, which led to a 33% increase in headcount, adding 2,000 new positions. This growth necessitated the acquisition and renovation of 220,000 square feet of new office space within a 12-month period. In Edmonton alone, the seated headcount increased from 1,550 to 1,950 within a year, with an expected further 20% growth rate company-wide. To manage this expansion, Enbridge needed to streamline its vacancy reporting, move management, departmental occupancy reporting, space forecasting, and floor plan management. The company relied heavily on ARCHIBUS to intelligently manage its growing workforce, property, and asset base. The goal was to establish standard business processes within a true enterprise information management (EIM) system to simplify real estate and facilities management business and technology processes, enhancing user productivity.

The National Health Service-Lanarkshire faced significant challenges due to incompatible systems across multiple services, a poorly structured management approach to asset and labor task management, and no consistent approach to reporting and measuring performance. These issues were exacerbated by a government mandate for greater operational accountability and efficiency in patient care. The facilities management professionals at NHS-Lanarkshire needed to address these inefficiencies to meet the new requirements and improve overall service delivery.

The University of Worcester aimed to modernize their maintenance procedures and create a help desk to improve performance and reporting standards. They needed to integrate data, manage workflows with a new help desk, and implement mobile working. The challenge was to ensure data accuracy, avoid duplication, and empower students and craftspeople while maintaining accountability and efficiency.

The capital project challenge for an organization as large as SDG&E, with its diverse facility types, is considerable given its more than 2 million square feet of office buildings, operating bases, substations, and payment centers. Upgrading the existing system to manage that function required a plan equally large to connect its multiple platforms and make them work as one. The legacy project management system in place, along with Microsoft Project, ARCHIBUS applications, Maximo for processing work orders, and SAP handling the company’s financials, created a fragmented environment. This setup couldn't easily perform automated, bi-directional data interchanges with other systems, leading to inefficiencies and a lack of integration.

AMD faced the challenge of managing a diverse and complex portfolio of properties and facilities while aiming to reduce its carbon footprint. With 39 facilities worldwide totaling over 2 million square feet and supporting over 10,000 employees, AMD needed a robust system to track and manage environmental inputs and outputs, including electricity and water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and refrigerant tracking. The company also aimed to achieve rigorous sustainability and compliance goals, such as 25% renewable energy use and a 20% absolute greenhouse gas reduction by 2020. Additionally, AMD required a system that could integrate seamlessly with its existing space and employee data, provide global site access, and offer comprehensive reporting capabilities.

Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino and Ciampino Airports are expected to experience significant growth over the coming decades. To manage this growth, Aeroporti di Roma Group (ADR), the exclusive facilities management vendor, needed to update its financial, real estate, and facilities management information systems. The challenge was to re-engineer these systems to handle the anticipated increase in passenger volume, which is projected to reach 100 million passengers a year by 2040, up from 40 million today. Additionally, ADR needed to manage the expanded terminal and runway footprint, upgraded facilities management, telecommunications, and financial systems. The goal was to improve facilities management and planning, provide more responsive service to resident businesses, enhance the passenger experience, and ensure regulatory and tax compliance.

In 2014, GEF realized that they were handling too many separate sets of equipment while managing the Frejus Tunnel, partially due to safety measures implemented since 2000. In addition to systems for ventilation and multiple forms of signage and lighting, they also had to track the data output from, and the maintenance of, 241 video cameras, complex fire detection and suppression systems, and thermal gates at each entrance. Safety concerns also led to the construction of a new rescue tunnel in 2007. While TECNOSITAF had their own software to manage the input from these systems and to respond to emergencies, some of their maintenance systems were outdated. For instance, what few CAD drawings they had of the tunnel dated back to the tunnel’s construction in 1980; they did not have a clear maintenance history for their assets, and they managed work orders through an Excel spreadsheet. While the tunnel was being maintained effectively, GEF and TECNOSITAF decided that it needed to be maintained more efficiently as well, and turned to ARCHIBUS.

On June 23, 2012, a fire erupted in the foothills of Colorado Springs. Though the fire was three miles and two canyons away from the Vantage Heights neighborhood, residents were evacuated and informed to take belongings for 72 hours as a precaution. Residents believed they would all be back in their homes soon because the focus of the fire were homes in a neighborhood up in the foothills. On June 26, a perfect storm of conditions hit between a thunderstorm to the west, high winds, and flame. Unexpectedly, the fire jumped the two canyons and then with the energy from the thunderstorm, blew the inferno down into the Vantage Heights area, consuming 347 homes and killing two people. Areas that weren’t in danger and not evacuated on the 23rd were engulfed in flames, and people fled with fire within range of their homes. Following the massive destruction of the neighborhood, some residents chose to rebuild and others sold their lots and moved to new locations.

In sales for nearly a quarter century, Bobby Russo was the quintessential road warrior. Then he got remarried to a woman who wanted to start a family. Settling in Hershey, Pennsylvania, they had two boys — Caleb (now almost 4) and Cory (now almost 2). Something had to give. “I travelled roughly 165,000 miles per year, 235 hotel nights per year,” Russo recalls. “Four years ago, I remarried. And I married a younger woman who wanted children.” In October 2012, Russo came home from another long stint on the road. A successful businessman, Russo had built up a sporting goods company, sold it in 2000 after eight years, and retired at age 36. He was lured out of retirement in 2002 to become North American sales manager for a large multinational electronics company, a position he held for a decade. When Russo came back home for a few days in late 2012, his wife sat him down and asked him two questions that changed his life for the better. “’What are you doing?’” he recalls her asking him. “‘You’ve got two beautiful kids. You don’t need to do this. Why don’t you retire and spend more time with your family?’” Russo did just that. “Caleb, who was three, was saying, ‘Daddy come home. Daddy, come home,’ and every time we’d pass a black Lincoln Town Car, he’d say, ‘Daddy, don’t go to the airport,’ because that’s what would come to the house to take me to the airport. And every time he saw one, he’d go, ‘Daddy, don’t leave.’ And then we’d see an airplane, and he’d say, ‘Daddy, don’t leave.’ So that was tough.” He planned to relocate his young family to Charleston, South Carolina, putting down an offer on a house, and planning to take the next decade off until his boys began high school. Then Russo’s father got wind of his son’s plans. “’You’re really retiring? What’s the big issue?’” he recalled his father asking him. “I told him it was travel,” Russo says. “There are only about 35 weeknights a year when I’m in my own bed, at home with my family. I don’t want to do what I did with Nikki [his 22 year-old daughter] and not be around all the time.” His father replied, “‘Well if the only issue’s travel, I need your help with this property management company I have out here [in Florence, Arizona]. We can run the business together.’” Russo had a short retirement. He and his family relocated to the Phoenix area in early 2013. Impulse Property Management, the company he took over, has 7 real estate agents, 2 property managers, and then the Russos as owners. They manage 122 buildings with 136 total units. In early 2013, however, his father had shoulder surgery and left the day-to-day operations of the property management business to the two property managers on staff. By April 1, when Bobby Russo was due to take over the property management side of the business, it was a mess. “I inherited a company with ticked off tenants because their deposits had been stolen. We had owners ticked off because we had property managers who weren’t paying owner payments, and we had no way of tracking payments if the owners called in. Our property managers were so confused, they blew off the owners. When I started on April 1, there were four messages on the voicemail from customers looking for information. In all, there were 25 messages going back two months. Checks were on the floor. Checks were piled on desks. Who’s current? We couldn’t get a rent roll to save our lives. No work orders were being used, so vendors were coming in and dropping off invoices, and an audit we did showed at least one vendor who had billed us for work he’d never done.” “We needed to completely turn around how people looked at this company,” Russo recalls. “Here we were, two basically retired guys with a business that’s worth something that maybe I can give to my kids someday, and a market (property management) that’s growing — it’s the fastest growing segment of the real estate business. Owners and tenants needed 24/7 access to their accounts, to be able to list vacant houses, owners should be able to see the houses are listed right away, how we market them and what we’re doing, and they should be able to see the rental applications. They need to have full visibility into our activities.” When Russo took over the business on April 1, he knew he needed to clean house. “I looked at the accounting in our legacy property management software program, and it was a disaster. I called them up. I saw $700,000 in security deposits, $800,000 in income, leases with no expiration dates.There was no double entry bookkeeping going on. The legacy property management software company said we’d need to do a complete reset of the software, wipe out all the data, and start out as if we were a brand new company. I said to them, ‘If I’m going to do that, I’m going to do it with another company.’” “So I started calling around to other property management software companies,” Russo recalls. He even called Salesforce.com, which his previous company had used as an early adopter since 2005, to see if they could help him manage the property management side of the business. “On the real estate side of the business, they’d be perfect,” he says, “but for property management, all they could really provide is a cloud background, and creating as custom solution for us would have cost at least $50,000.”

Annapolis Property Services (APS) has been in business since 2003. They specialize in long-term residential property management in the Annapolis area. They currently manage more than 300 units — apartments, condos, townhomes, and single-family homes. Because APS prides itself on providing “hands-on” service to distinguish themselves in their local market, they sought out new and better ways to meet the needs of renters and property owners by providing them more efficient, professional service. Before trying Buildium, says Cook, “we were using online bill pay with our bank, which involved huge additional accounting time and a much greater opportunity for error.” They also needed to manually email statements to each of their property owners. Making matters worse, they were fielding a large volume of calls from tenants with maintenance requests and questions about water bills. It was taking at least 20% of the 8-hour work day just to respond to the calls, get copies of leases, and follow up on requests. These routine, non-urgent calls took up valuable staff time that couldn’t be spent fielding sales-related calls from property owners, showing properties, inspecting properties, and fixing the maintenance issues.

As a board member of Liberty Place, Shirley wanted to help create a condo community that would be very open, organized and offer greater convenience. As it stood, Liberty Place was not set up to achieve this. Major challenges included: Communication – was difficult, irregular and had to be delivered manually to residents’ doors. Visitor Parking – was being exploited by residents as there was no solid monitoring in place. Deliveries – were hard to process and track, taking up valuable concierge time. All the while, Shirley was constantly being alerted to complaints from residents asking questions like “why can’t we do this ourselves” and “why isn’t there an online system in place?” The archaic processes that were originally in place quickly became pain points for residents and the board alike. In order to provide the residents of Liberty Place with the level of convenience expected, Shirley and the board looked for a solution. The solution needed to have the functionality to solve current challenges yet add a greater level of convenience to all stakeholders.

In order to provide Brickell Bay residents with a higher level of service and greater peace of mind in emergency situations, it was important for Roxana and the board to look at current operational challenges and evaluate how they could be automated and streamlined. Major challenges included: Communication - Updating the Brickell Bay residents with important information has always been pivotal in maintaining a functioning condo community. At Brickell Bay, communicating with residents was a very time-consuming manual task that took up unnecessary resources. In particular, there was no quick way to reach out to all residents in an emergency situation. This was a massive fear for both management and residents. Working Remotely – Roxana is often being pulled in many directions and not always available on site. In order to keep productivity high and be able to deal with urgent requests and emergencies outside of business hours, Roxana needed a simple mobile solution to access, review and approve processes remotely. Security & Concierge – Security is of utmost importance to the Brickell Bay community. Many aspects of the security staffs’ daily activities were logged manually. This didn’t allow for easy reporting, which made it difficult for Roxana to make informed decisions on security-related incidences. In the event of a natural disaster, when the risk of a security breach is higher, Roxana was unable to easily review historical data that would help manage risk during this time. In addition to this, the concierge was having trouble keeping up with the number of package deliveries and notifying residents of their arrival. This was a manual and time-consuming task and proved particularly difficult during extreme weather which often causes confusion and a backlog in deliveries.

Casa II management faced significant challenges in handling deposits and payments efficiently. The major concerns included loss of revenue due to the lack of a payment system for elevator usage, manual payment options that were time-consuming and expensive, and security issues related to handling cash transactions. These challenges necessitated a solution that could streamline payment processes, ensure security, and provide convenience to residents.

In his current role, Muamer is always on the lookout for new processes and technologies that will help with day-to-day operations, as well as attract and retain clients. He has been exposed to the operational and security needs of all types of condo buildings – some who embraced technology and others who were not quite there yet – and found one thing remained true: the use of technology certainly helped with productivity and security. In buildings with no software, Elite ran into the following issues: Added Value - Throughout Muamer’s career within the condo security industry, he has been exposed to various property management and security software platforms. It was evident early on that the use of technology to assist in Elite’s security services should be an area of focus. Elite often found while going to tender for new clients they either asked for software to be included or their competitors offered one. Transparency – If a building didn’t already have a software in place, it made it difficult to document incidents and provide complete transparency with property management and board members alike. Preventative measures – When providing security services to larger condos who did not have software in place, Elite found it challenging to administer preventative measures. Without any solid records to refer to, it was very difficult to track patterns over time and thus come up with an informed preventative plan of action.

When Mark took over the role as property manager at X Condos, it was his mission to review all aspects of operations. Mark’s core focus was to look at better, more efficient ways to carry out day-to-day operations to better serve the X Condo community. During this phase, it was determined that the property management software being used at the building was not helping achieve Mark’s goals. The prior platform posed the following major issues: User-experience - Throughout Mark’s career within the property management industry, he has been exposed to various property management software platforms. Upon commencing his role at X Condos he was quick to discover the property management platform that was already in place was extremely difficult to navigate and not at all user-friendly. In addition to this, there was very little in way of support - they were difficult to get in contact with and often issues were left unresolved. Maintaining multiple databases – Prior to switching, X Condos were using one platform to manage most of the community operations and another platform to send out communications to residents. This meant that two databases needed to be maintained at all times. This doubled the administrative work and created a higher chance of human error when updating information between the two databases. Missing Features – A couple of major features were missing from the previous platform being used at X Condos; Service Requests and Proxy Voting. Residents could not log service requests online and had to contact the property management team directly, which they could only do during their work hours. The property management team also had no ability to send out and receive proxy votes for their AGM online. This created a lot of extra legwork for the property management team as they had to chase down owners for their votes in order to reach quorum.