Lease Agreement Management

Our customer is the world’s largest commercial Real Estate services and investment firm. They offer a broad range of integrated services, including facilities, transactions and project management; property management; investment management; appraisal and valuation; property leasing; strategic consulting; property sales; mortgage services and development services.

• Size: 100,000 employees
• Geographical Reach: Global
• Annual Turnover (2019): USD 24 Billion

The company is always in search of customer experience improvement without impacting internal cost and eventually the bottom line. Customer lease agreements constantly need to be adjusted to adapt to occupiers’ requirements. However even with the existing Lease Event solution, management of commercial lease contract was not streamlined. That is why, AMO was chosen to rebuild the application to cater for the increasing needs of the business.

The Challenge

The company’s Lease Management Operation was often found under strain due to the sheer volume of changes.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to coordinate the interdepartmental efforts to manage Leases Agreement changes in the UK. New Leases were identified as the key billing process pain point and the existing Lease Events solution presented a number of limitations including inter-system data discrepancy. The manual reconciliation was compounded by the fact that the user interface was not intuitive enough, hence slowing the whole process down.

Prior to implementing the new version of Lease Events App, the company was facing numerous challenges:

• Property Management involves multiple teams and departments including finance, billing, accounting. Lack of a standardised system led to confusion as to each other’s roles and responsibilities.
• Complex approval matrices and processes resulted in Lease Operations bottleneck and resulting backlog.
• Ever-changing service charges were not accurately tracked.
• Incorrect billing which translated into errors in the System and service charge backlog.
• Due to the complexity of the process, communication with customers was broken and lengthy. This resulted in high volumes of client queries and escalations related to billing
• Inter-departmental performance was not measurable which made it difficult to provide guaranteed SLAs to end-customers.
• Internal handover of tasks between the different teams was not straightforward. The use of emails between departments was prone to confusion and errors.
• Data inconsistencies between systems implied that more time was wasted to reconcile data and cost calculations.

AMO Journey

AMO was selected to rebuild the existing platform to remove impediments and accelerate process and team’s performance. Business workshops were carried out to pinpoint weaknesses in the processes and ways to optimise them.

Eventually, AMO designed a new dynamic interface underpinned by complex matrices. The business workflow was revamped entirely to include different approval layers and scenarios. Nintex K2 Five technology was also leveraged to neatly integrate with Tramps and Yardi systems; both software pillars in Property and Real Estate industry.

The Solution

The objective of the solution was to improve the quality and timeliness of the end-to-end billing process with a view to standardise approach & streamline activities. The bespoke solution implemented by AMO enables complete traceability for any changes required on active lease agreements. This includes surveyors’ data input, contractual reviews, billing management, and invoicing.

The platform provides strict governance while focussing on specific users’ needs at every stage of the process. Change management performance is also measured now, to provide executive visibility on pinch points and areas for improvement.

With the redesigned Lease Event Application, the customer is reaping the following benefits:

• Processing time was dramatically reduced
• Quality, consistency, and productivity were improved as teams are more focused on their areas of expertise.
• Clearer visibility and better control with quicker turnaround times.
• Accurate & timely billing. The improvement in the billing process led to less rework, quicker end-to-end delivery times, and ultimately a better customer and colleague experience.
• Better collaboration among departments
• Competitive advantage as the leasing solution enhances both personnel and market efficiencies.

This application provides a technological edge as they are now capable to honour contractual changes quicker and therefore provide commercial adjustments in a very tight timeframe with great accuracy.