Office Plus Automates Insights to Determine Rental Growth in a Specific Location

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Author:

Thomas Lui, Rex Chang and Jay Lam

Role:

Business Analysts (Thomas and Rex), Head of Information and Technology (Jay)

Company:

Office Plus

Overview of Use Case

Established in 1948, Hip Shing Hong has built a robust portfolio of real estate in Hong Kong which includes hotels, office buildings, high-end homes and over 200 retail properties. We have successfully created reputable brands like Office Plus, The Collab, Madera Residences, Madera Hotel, Madera Cafe, Madera Yoga, Genesis, Gravity, Le Riviera and many others. Since the early 1960s, HSH have generously donated over 500 charitable projects large and small benefiting the underprivileged and people in crises.

One of Hip Shing Hong’s key brands, Office Plus, offers hassle free, fully furnished and equipped office units which allow our clients to move in instantly and start their business operations right away with flexible terms by providing premium fit-outs including the necessary equipment for the property and final decoration and fitments in four prime locations in Hong Kong. Our company needed a way to bring together different data sources into a single powerful platform, allowing our users to do data analysis and obtain the answers on their own in a self-service manner, hence saving us much needed time. The Alteryx Designer self-service data and analytics offering is our solution in making this a reality.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

The Hong Kong property market is extremely fast-paced and competitive; therefore, it is important for us to adopt a modern approach to support our business models. It is time-consuming to bring the required data from various systems together for our managements to review before specific business decision can be made. Time to value is an important factor in supporting our decision-making process to ensure timely business requirements are met.

The Finance and Leasing team at Office Plus’s needed a more modern and flexible way to bring multiple data sources together, allowing rapid access to information in order to:

• Provide critical business insights from real-time data to support the business decisions and development of strategies to meet market needs.
• Generate reports directly rather than relying on external vendors to create reports and consolidating them together.

The team previously used a manual and time-consuming approach in writing SQL scripts to transform the data from their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system Oracle EBS and Enterprise Asset Management system (EAM) Samex Systems before any analysis and visualising could be achieved.

By using Alteryx, the time required to generate a report for our management’s review has been reduced from one month to one week, offering our management faster business insights which leads to swifter decision making and operational changes, and impactful results.

Alteryx was introduced to Office Plus by Velocity Business Solutions (VBS), an Alteryx Premier Partner in Hong Kong that provides Alteryx enablement, development and implementation services to clients across Asia Pacific. Velocity has been a leading partner of Alteryx since 2014.

Describe your working solution

Velocity Business Solutions (VBS) and the team at Office Plus IT team consisting of two IT Business Analysts worked with the business users of Finance and Leasing team to collectively build the required solution on Alteryx.

Alteryx Designer is used for data extraction, data parsing and data cleaning in more than 20 repeatable workflows across the Finance and Leasing team.

This workflow compares the new rent to the previous rent to determine rental growth in a specific location. The result is then exported seamlessly back into Office Plus’s designated data warehouse. The high-level steps of the workflow are:

1. Extracts lease information from Oracle EBS ERP system.
2. Compares the new rent to the previous rent of the same location. Then, it calculates rental growth.
3. Exports results back into data warehouse.   
   

Describe the benefits you have achieved

The Finance and Leasing team found that Alteryx Designer offers a highly flexible and scalable data management with access on demand for:

• Extracting data from multiple platforms.
• Creating different workflows for various business goals/objectives.
• Automating repeatable workflows and collaborate results between team members.
• Providing effortless visualization for management and team’s insight discovery.

As previously mentioned, just this task was transformed from one month to now one week to complete. We can’t wait to explore further on additional benefits Alteryx Designer may bring to our business.