Summary
Colliers is a global leader in real estate services and investment management. With a team of 18,000 professionals, Colliers operates in 65 countries and manages $46 billions in assets. The company executes 54,000 lease/sale transactions annually.
With a vision for modernization, efficiency and excellence, Colliers aims to provide their workforce with critical, relevant and up-to-date insights at their fingertips. They turned to Queryon to help with the design and deployment of a world wide Power BI solution.
2020 statistics, U.S. dollars
Challenge
The project posed challenges from multiple aspects including data size and complexity, user interface, access privileges, and above all, what relevant analytics to display.
Vast amounts of data was being generated from tens of thousands of professionals and transactions, as well as millions of website visits. Although daunting, the amount of data was also exciting because Power BI is an excellent tool for mining the data and deriving useful business intelligence from it. Prior to Power BI, the Colliers analytical team had to gather data and manually build reports in order to provide information to the field agents. Delays in providing the report might result in a lost opportunity to close a deal.
The data came from various systems and databases (Google Analytics, SQL property listing database, Cinchy, Excel mapping files etc.) and had to be brought together in a well structured data model.
Because of the large international workforce, the solution had to be user-friendly and be able to handle multiple languages.
In addition, due to the size of the organization, multiple managerial levels needed to have different access privileges.
To gain maximum benefits from the new Power BI solution, the data had to be refreshed daily, the information had to be insightful, accurate, relevant and easy to read.
Strategy
Power BI was the tool of choice to tackle the challenges.
Because data accuracy was a key aspect, extensive audits were performed which resulted in the strengthening of several Extraction Transformation and Loading processes to eliminate data issues.
To address the different organizational access privileges, row level security was implemented. As a user logs into the Power BI solution, the user will only be able to see what the specific profile allows. Profiles were created for Regional managers, Country managers, Real Estate associates, to name a few.
An important strategy was to have the right mix of talent from both Colliers and Queryon. Being foundational to the project, Colliers’ vision and business needs were inspiring and well articulated. The Queryon team pulled from multi-faceted experience to bring that vision to fruition by devising simple yet powerful visual reports, navigation and functionality.
Results
The synergies and collaboration between Colliers and Queryon contributed to the success of the solution designed. After deployment in several regions of the globe, Colliers professionals can now easily access key up-to-date business intelligence about their properties, which gives them a competitive edge. With the information, they can make the right decisions faster and therefore close transactions more promptly. Similarly, Regional and Country managers can now analyze their portfolios, thus managing their teams more efficiently with the opportunity to maximize their potential.
The use of Power BI resulted in improved competitiveness, productivity and informed decision making. In turn, these values not only boost the confidence of the workforce, but also accelerate the success of the Colliers team and their clients.
Learn more about Colliers here.
