October 9, 2006 - Facilities Management
Round numbers offer a good idea of how big General Growth Properties is: more than 200 regional shopping malls. More than 200 million square feet of space. More than 24,000 retail stores and anchor department stores.
But round numbers don’t cut it with leasing and site plans. Maintaining precise CAD data on those plans is the responsibility of the company’s tenant coordination department. And when the department had to rely on manual updates to CAD drawings, the process created a time lag between identifying required changes and making plan updates widely available — a delay that opened the door to mistakes.
To provide up-to-date information through an intranet portal, General Growth selected FM:Interact. Providing easy integration with AutoCAD, the FM:Systems product made it possible to connect the property management system with other data sources. For example, linking the property management system to an enterprise CRM system enabled leasing agents to access up-to-date data such as market demographics, leasing data and mall data. “It is a leasing representative’s window into their data,” says CIO Kevin Moss.
Since the system was implemented, the time required to maintain CAD drawings has significantly dropped. Incoming requests from the leasing department have also dropped, because they can access updated information through the intranet portal. The system has also made it easier to remerchandise available space. “Now our leasing agents and potential tenants can visualize critical property information in real-time — helping us generate more revenue,” says Moss.
