Colliers CRE
Colliers CRE streamlines their business with single Agency System
Colliers CRE is a property management and services company, with national coverage and a strong range of expert services and business sectors including: a specialist hotels division; surveying practices; and logistics and industrial specialists.
They have offices throughout the UK and Europe, employ around a thousand staff, and have annual revenue around £200million.
Problem
Colliers CRE had many software systems in use across their departments, including accounting, marketing, contact relationship and websites. Departments were using some company-wide software systems, but were largely treated as islands, with autonomous decisions leading to multiple incompatible systems, duplication of effort and wasted resources.
It was recognised that common business processes existed across all agency departments, and that efficiencies could be gained by implementing a set of intelligent integrated applications.
The project involved close relationships with several worldwide
governments, had been in planning for several years, and had
received wide press coverage. As such the project needed to be
delivered on-time, and without fault.
Solution
In 2002 Evolvin started work with Colliers CRE to identify the common processes, and to highlight and document the individual department’s requirements. This process was performed with the inclusion of the heads of departments and key staff, which ensured that adoption would be universal and of maximum benefit to all concerned.
A customised version of the Evolvin Agency Software was built to the specifications derived above, which was delivered to a hosting environment managed by Colliers CRE.
Common functionality was available to all staff, and specialised features made available to the departments as required. This customisation ranged from provision of extra data fields and drop down categories, to entire new modules of functionality relating to valuations, professional services and the provision of property auctions.
The application was integrated with other systems within Colliers CRE, including the accounts and billing engines, marketing and job management.
Evolvin technology was also used to build and power a set of public facing websites, allowing the searching and presentation of available property and the registration of potential buyers and their requirements.
Benefit
Colliers CRE now use a single instance of the Evolvin Agency Software across all of their agency departments, and the staff use this system more than any other. The system allows a common experience, which reduces the need for training and increases the use of sharing resources across departments such as administration and secretarial.
The adaptability of the software has allowed new departments to be formed with minimum overheads, and existing departments to streamline their processes in an ongoing cycle of betterment.
A simple truth that indicates the benefit of this relationship is that during the recent downturn, one of the few IT projects that remained active, and was actually written into the company’s business plan, was the Evolvin Agency Software roll-out and development.