AMB Leads the Industrial Market Into the 21st Century

Supercharging Collaboration... What's the best way to manage a one thousand-building, 92 million square-foot portfolio? Well, if you're AMB, it's not outsourcing to a single property management firm, and it's not managing your properties in-house. If you're AMB, the most efficient way is to hire the best fifty property managers in their markets AND to standardize their operations with web-based reporting and policy tools. That's the story that Wayne Pryor, Chief Technology Officer, told me recently on a visit to AMB's San Francisco headquarters as he outlined AMB's technology initiatives.

AMB is an industrial REIT with a national portfolio of properties concentrated in major distribution markets located near airports, ports and major freeway systems. According to Pryor, technology should drive process innovation. So the focus of his group is to maximize collaboration not only among AMB's 185 employees, but also between AMB's employees and the 400 associated professionals managing its assets. Centralizing data and providing secure access to this data are the keys to this initiative. For example, AMB's forecasting program extracts data from CTI (property management / TheREALM) and ARGUS (financial analysis / TheREALM) applications, and exports it to a web-based forecasting program accessible to local managers. Result: No paper required and thirty days knocked off the budgeting process.

Another example. AMB's Property Operating Report enables its property managers to explain accounting variances over the web. No paper required. And soon AMB's Space Availabilities Report will be integrated with LoopNet which effectively ties in AMB's property management program with a public listing service. These tech initiatives are hugely complicated with zillions of nuances and tweaks available to the management of AMB. But the bottom line is that AMB can report its financial results just nine days after a quarter ends. Want more? Listen to CEO Hamid Moghadam's webcast on Wednesday, January 23, 2002 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific (click Investor Center on AMB's home page).

--Peter Pike