For nearly five years, CTA has been developing, deploying, and maintaining an Intranet-based portal for a large nation-wide organization with a real estate portfolio of over 6000 properties. This portal is used internally by the corporate properties organization to manage several facility and property-related functions online.

Two key benefits of the system are automated communication and centralized reporting. For example, the project management department is notified automatically via e-mail when a project request is submitted, and project managers and customers are automatically notified when a project is assigned. The centralized reporting capabilities of the system allow management to view real-time reports of projects, property summaries, real estate negotiations, and other features online at any time.

Some of these online applications are shown below.

• Request for Services: The project request and tracking application permits online lifecycle management of service requests and property development projects, including submission of the request, assignment of project managers, and status tracking through completion. The Request for Services function is available online to over 150,000 employees across the country; over 12,000 requests for services have been processed by this system.



• Property Management Services: The portal is the primary source of property information within the organization and permits authorized users the capability to view information on a single property or the entire portfolio. Functions include lookup of a property's manager and viewing portfolio inventory.



• Online Budgeting: The yearly budgeting function is completed online as the property management hierarchy accesses and updates financial information for individual properties, which is automatically rolled up to regional and corporate levels. This suite of applications includes features for estimating asset preservation projects, forecasting lease income and expenses, integrating past years' actual expenses, and automatically escalating account groups with customizable inflationary rates.



• Lease Management: Lease managers and negotiators access and update lease information online, and changes are automatically communicated to property management, contract management, accounting, and other relevant parts of the organization.



• Emergency Response Center: The portal includes an online information center that permits authorized users the ability to enter, edit, view, and manage emergency events with a facility context.



• Other Online Services: A dynamically managed Home Page with an online publishing capability allows management to provide timely information to portal users. A Clearinghouse function to permit organizations and employees to offer excess equipment for transfer to other organizations, which makes better use of excess equipment and relieves property managers from having to perform this function.

The system also interfaces with enterprise-wide applications such as SAP (financial system), Strategen (lease management system), Aperture (occupancy tracking system), Facility Center (asset management/preventive maintenance/dispatch services system), and other client-specific systems, as well as hosting a data warehouse and serving as the enterprise's primary online reporting and decision support system.