J.D. Edwards Wants to Simplify Your Life

Digital Nirvana... This year I've written six Dispatches about the challenge of integrating information from various applications -- Apr 25, May 14, Jun 27, Jul 19, Sep 20, Oct 4. But can one company handle all of your real estate data needs? Well, for months Andrew Rains, Worldwide Industry Manager for Real Estate at J.D. Edwards & Company, has been saying, "Hey, Peter, we really do it."

With sales of $1 billion, J.D. Edwards (NASDAQ: JDEC) provides "business-to-business software and services to enable companies to engage in collaborative commerce with their suppliers, customers and other business partners." Obviously, real estate is just a small piece of J.D. Edwards' business. But Rains says the real estate "vertical" is a clear priority for growing their revenues.

In addition to backend property management, general ledger, and facilities management modules, J.D. Edwards now offers a suite of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools for marketing and sales force automation -- all web-based. Translation: You can track deals online. Example: You own a shopping center. You can now run a report showing lead sources, the status of transactions, and even the reasons that you've lost deals.

As Rains toured me around his demo site (via PlaceWare), I was overwhelmed by screen after screen of information -- KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), Executive Dashboards and "self-service portals." Wow, I thought, this is a neat system -- if you can motivate folks to enter all of their activities. Installation of such a system would require a large training program. Rains countered by saying that the entire system was web-based and therefore easy to move around and understand. He said that companies like Equity Office Properties claimed to have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's a heck of an incentive for folks to make it work.

Future Presentations... I'll moderate the opening panel discussion at the joint Harvard GSD / NAIOP / ULI conference in Cambridge, MA, on Thursday, November 15. ... And I'll make a presentation -- "Reality Check: What's the Right Balance between Technology and People?" -- at NACORE's Symposium in Nashville, TN, on Tuesday, December 4. Hope to see you!

--Peter Pike