Managing multi-million commercial real estate development projects is a massive responsibility. But making sound financial decisions is arguably one of the most important considerations.
Enterprises must use the right reporting tools to generate insights and leverage vast amounts of financial data effectively. With strong financial analytics processes, organizations can make confident, data-informed decisions and improve their overall financial health.
Dave Sawdey is a principal at Avison Young, a global commercial real estate service firm. He leads the company’s portfolio analytics and business intelligence team.
The top goals for Dave’s team include:
- Enabling better reporting on their real estate portfolios.
- Generating accurate data-driven insights.
- Delivering better, smarter, and faster real estate services.
To help their clients and brokers be successful with data across all of these fronts, Avison Young uses Power BI as their go-to business intelligence tool.
Legacy Reporting Tools Limit Capabilities
One of Avison Young’s clients needed to create a series of financial dashboards in their enterprise accounting system to track and manage budgets for a multi-million, multi-year real estate construction project.
Legacy reporting tools couldn’t meet the reporting requirements or fast-evolving user expectations. Dave’s client needed tools with more advanced capabilities to support effective financial management.
Power BI quickly arose as a natural solution to the depth of insights that they needed to achieve.
This powerful platform helps organizations boost efficiency by streamlining data analysis, visualization, and reporting processes. Most importantly for the Avision Young BI team, it offers customized dashboards that help business leaders easily visualize the most relevant and critical data.
Power BI Expertise On-Demand
To deliver a successful implementation, Dave and his team needed subject matter expertise and Power BI knowledge to complete the project. Dave chose to work with Collectiv because of the flexibility and agility of our Consulting as a Service (CaaS) offerings.
CaaS’s flexibility allowed Avison Young to start the project immediately per their client’s requirements. Dave was able to navigate the project’s changing scope and complexity without missing a beat. Additionally, Dave’s team could get ongoing support from Collectiv as the project evolved.
“Collectiv made an impact from day one and made sure we had a solid project foundation,” Dave said. “Collectiv brought a wealth of problem-solving experience to the table. We had access to an entire team of experts who strengthened the implementation process with real-world experience.”
Dave appreciated Collectiv’s professionalism and communication skills so much that the Collectiv team was able to be directly involved in their client meetings. Ultimately, Collectiv became an extension of Avison Young’s team, providing deep expertise in Power BI and Power Query so they could help their clients achieve greater success with business intelligence efforts.
Report Adoption and Usage Doubled
This particular project aimed to help one of Avison Young’s clients move away from legacy reporting tools to Power BI dashboards. The results would only be as good as the client’s ability to adopt the solution and use Power BI’s robust features.
Our collaboration with Avison Young allowed them to create user-friendly Power BI dashboards for their client, which resulted in a doubling of report adoption and usage. Avison Young’s client can now manage costs, stay on budget, and set realistic expectations with accurate data insights.
“I had a great experience working with Collectiv,” Dave recounted. “I’ll absolutely hire them for future Power BI projects as we expand the platform here at Avison Young.”
Ready to move on from legacy financial analytics tools but unsure where to start with Power BI? Take advantage of Collectiv’s Consulting as a Service for flexible support that matches the exact needs of your organization.
