Business Intelligence tool for property management

Overview

William Pears is one of the most significant property companies in the UK. In order to successfully manage not only thousands of properties but more importantly their own finances, they had to manually enter data into various spreadsheets. With time, they realised they required an innovative solution which would automate generating multiple reports regarding both their properties and lessees and thus enable them to gain greater control over their incomes and expenses. They asked HeadChannel to provide them with a business intelligence tool to easily organise data using different business parameters.

Our client wished to use Qlik to visualise their business data, which is why we designed and developed a powerful back-end of a business intelligence system and integrated it with the data visualisation application, allowing William Pears to effortlessly analyse automatically generated and categorised information.

Features

Since the amount of information our client processed on a daily basis was constantly increasing, they required a solution which would enable them to easily organise data in order to analyse it. To improve this process, we equipped the back-end system with the following features:

• ETL summary – informs a user of all successful data integrations along with potential integration problems,
• Source data management – enables access to raw, uncategorised data for the chosen period,
• Snapshot approval – allows users to manually confirm integration when they want to make sure all data is up-to-date (e.g. all transactions are booked in the accounts),
• Manual mappings – organises data using various business parameters (e.g. types of properties, types of expenses),
• Data exception report – indicates business data anomalies (e.g. differences between expected and paid rent)

Benefits

Introducing automation to their business, William Pears now gains:

• Visibility – with all data updated and organised, they can access relevant business information with a single click,
• Control – a clear view of their incomes and expenses, they can easily spot new cost-saving opportunities,
• Efficiency – the time which was spent on manually entering data into spreadsheets can now be spent on more challenging tasks,
• Data-driven decisions – full access to business data enables the company to accurately predict future trends and make better business decisions

Success story

The business intelligence system allows William Pears to automatically generate an infinite variety of custom reports. Without the necessity of labour-intensive data manipulation required in Excel, the company saves up to 50 hours of work per report. Additionally, data visualisation enables them to analyse data from various perspectives and thus make more accurate long-term decisions.

Project facts

• Team – Developers 2 (Team Leader, mid dev), QA 1, BA 1, PM 1
• Project management – Scrum for production, Kanban for maintenance
• Technology – Orchard CMS, ASP.NET MVC, Qlik Sense, AngularJS