New Data And Analytics Platform Offers Holistic View

RED, an open and scalable data and analytics platform from JLL, is designed to uncover insights that can power business performance and help corporate real estate professionals reach new levels of productivity in the workplace and workspace. RED brings together master data governance, knowledge management, business intelligence, and advanced analytics to improve real estate decision making.

The RED platform is designed to integrate CRE data with sales, workforce, finance, economic, and other business data to offer a holistic view of a corporation’s business and macroeconomic environment. Its open architecture enables a company to integrate data from almost any source and visualize the results through interactive dashboards.  

This new platform is being introduced at a time when corporate real estate executives are experiencing growing pressures to contribute measurable value to their organizations. According to JLL’s 2015 Global Corporate Real Estate biennial survey and report, 77% of corporate real estate executives say that managing operating expenses is a C-suite priority, and 61% report pressure to improve the productivity of their physical real estate assets.

“Corporate real estate (CRE) is a top three company expense, and RED enables CRE teams to answer the most complex questions around business productivity with one simplified, integrated view,” explains John Forrest, JLL CEO of Corporate Solutions, Americas. “It’s about empowering and equipping clients with real-time insights so they can be more agile and are better equipped to respond swiftly to our everchanging corporate real estate environment and business pressures.” 

Available exclusively to JLL’s corporate clients, RED is based on the same technologies used by banks, telecommunications companies, and other industries to automate and manage large volumes of data from diverse sources.

RED offers a full spectrum of tools to uncover areas for improved productivity with customizable dashboards and detailed analytical models. RED can help with real estate and business decisions such as:

  • Planning post-merger consolidations;
  • Creating cost-benefit analyses for different expansion scenarios, such as relocation versus renovation or expansion. This predictive capability is informed not only by real estate data, but also by labor costs and availability, quality-of-life factors, employee preferences and more;
  • Viewing energy usage trends across portfolios;
  • Analyzing lease terms and expiration timetables across multiple markets; and
  • Determining which corporate locations are more productive than others.

“We built this platform with our clients in mind,” explains Chris Browne, JLL COO of Corporate Solutions, Americas. “We wanted to offer the only industry platform that advances the science of real estate without requiring our clients to make major new technology investments or lengthy enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation.”

Real Street Tech followed up on the announcement with Richard Brown, Global Head of Business Intelligence, JLL. We asked:

How does RED differ from other data analytic platforms on the market?
Brown: JLL has taken a very different approach to real estate systems from many of our competitors. We have not tried to squeeze an enterprise resource planning-type system in to fit the very diverse applications needed in this sector. We have selected a series of best-in-class applications designed to perform each function optimally. The RED platform integrates these at a data level, synchronizing key data elements such as property and cost types across these applications, and by providing integrated analytics.

The platform comes with a whole set of best practice dashboards and reports out-of-the box based on JLL’s extensive experience, allowing our customers to be up and running straight out of the gate. RED is also designed as an open platform, taking data from markets and client business applications and enabling the use of advanced analytics to understand market opportunities and the impact of real estate on business performance. 

How is RED integrated with a client’s existing systems?
Brown: The beauty of this best-in-class applications approach is that we can easily swap in client applications. We have a data governance process and a data integration component that can be connected and provide synchronization of key data to the client systems. We use Informatica for data integration to the analytics platform, which allows us to connect with virtually any source. For presentation, we deliver using IBM Cognos and Microsoft business intelligence tools, but we also support other advanced analytical tools to fit with the client’s requirements and user experience. 

Click here to watch a video to learn more about how RED works.