Boeing, Oracle, Washington Mutual and Wells Get It

Who's Tops in Tech? ... Uh-oh. "Only 27% of corporate real estate departments indicate significant usage of technology. And 53% rate their current usage of technology 'limited or none.'" That's according to David Kamen of Ernst & Young, who reported these findings from a joint E&Y / NACORE study, "Corporate Real Estate Technology Benchmarking Survey," at last week's NACORE Symposium in Nashville. After outlining these rather sobering (my word) conclusions, Kamen moderated a discussion between four savvy corporate real estate tech leaders. A very nice counterbalance.

Just listen to Cheryl Howard, VP Corporate Real Estate at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, who's seen her headcount explode from 13,000 to 21,000 employees due to record low mortgage rates as she described managing 1,750 lease and owned facilities in all 50 states totaling 5 million square feet. She couldn't survive without lots of software tools, including Strategen for lease administration, ProCalc for cash flow analysis and Autocad for facilities management. Yet like many corporations, Wells Fargo struggles with issues like adoption, training, standardization and data integrity. ... Randy Smith, VP, US Real Estate & Facilities at Oracle, raved about Oracle's home-grown eCRE suite, which handles everything from Space Acquisition to Lease/Space Administration to Facility Management to Strategy Planning.

Ken Bateman, First VP at Washington Mutual Bank, described how seriously his company takes technology by saying that he has access to three tech professionals for 50% of their time. WAMU uses FIS for lease administration and Bricsnet for project management. ... Steve Barker, Director of Business Operations at Boeing Realty Corp, hammered away at the importance of standardizing the process and converting transaction managers to become "relationship managers." Boeing uses Visual Lease for lease administration and recently implemented Peregrine's suite of products for property and facility management. ... Yep, you better believe that technology is "significant" to these folks!

--Peter Pike