Commercial Real Estate is a dynamic industrial sector, where various activities such as construction, renovations, leasing, acquisitions, and disposition deals happen regularly. To ensure efficiency and accuracy, it is vital to have speed and consistency in performing due diligence and completing tasks. That’s why we created CRES Real Estate Solution, based on our extensive real estate technology experience. It is a solution built on the Microsoft 365 platform that integrates your data, documents, business processes, and business intelligence. A key component of this solution is CRES Workflow Management, which helps real estate organizations execute flawless activities of any kind. In this comprehensive article, we’ll explore the features of CRES Workflow Management, showing how it simplifies any type of process, enhances productivity, and guarantees accuracy.
What is Workflow Automation in Commercial Real Estate?
Workflow automation is the beating heart of modern businesses, and the real estate industry is no exception. Imagine a symphony of tasks orchestrated seamlessly—tasks assigned flawlessly, approvals flowing smoothly, documents drafted automatically, and processes aligned like a well-choreographed dance. CRES Workflow Management brings this vision to life, empowering real estate professionals to thrive in a competitive landscape.
Benefits of Workflow Automation
The key benefits of an ideal workflow automation tool are:
- Increased Productivity: Tasks are arranged in advance to speed up the process completion, saving time and energy for achieving organizational goals.
- Error Prevention: Some of the boring tasks in a business process are automated using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Software, reducing human errors, and ensuring fast and dependable processing of mundane and repetitive tasks.
- Better Teamwork: Workflow automation encourages teamwork by offering a central platform for communication and task management among departments and individuals.
- Cost Reduction: Simplified business processes help organizations to cut operational costs and use resources more effectively.
Understanding CRES Workflow Management
CRES Workflow Management serves as the central nervous system for efficient real estate operations. Let’s dissect its key components:
- Reusable Workplans: With CRES, you create reusable workplans for various business processes. We call them “Workflow Types” and they serve as blueprints, not only guiding your team through each step but also taking on the bulk of heavy lifting. Using CRES, you can easily define your unique Workflow Types, with corresponding Workflow Steps, while sequencing them or setting up triggers for them. This results in your reusable work plan. Say goodbye to reinventing the wheel with every project. Need to onboard a new retail tenant? Simply follow the established work plan, ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of oversights and missed deadlines.
- Workflow Triggers: Based on your portfolio-based critical dates or based on your planned schedule, your workflows can automatically trigger when they need to.
- All Workflow Step Types: Most off-the-shelf Workflow Software Tools are lacking in the type of tasks they include. With our research, we concluded that in an ideal workflow management software, there should be four types of steps or tasks. Following is a list of Task Types available in CRES. With these available tasks, you can accomplish anything you can imagine.
- Standard Task: Tasks that are automatically assigned to individuals to ensure consistent execution, so that each person knows what they are supposed to do, when, and how. Such tasks may require more complex human thought, interaction, and activities.
- Approval Task: These are tasks created for getting approvals for specific individuals or groups. The approvers should be able to easily approve, reject, or reply to approval requests. Workflow Systems must have the ability to track approvals and follow the process or stop it based on the outcome. Approval Tasks result in swift decision-making and preventing bottlenecks.
- Document Task: A Document Task should assist in the automatic drafting of documents. It should auto-populate relevant business data in document templates, to speed up the generation of contracts and other documents.
- RPA Task: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Tasks can automate mundane and repetitive tasks, such as data entry in internal and external systems the organization uses. Allowing software robots to perform repetitive actions, enhances speed and accuracy.
- Full Life Cycle Contract Management: Documents are the lifeblood of real estate. CRES manages them from birth to retirement:
- Creation: Draft contracts, agreements, and reports seamlessly within CRES.
- Collaboration: Internal and external users can collaborate to finalize the draft.
- Signature Routing: Automatically send contracts for sign-off by individuals or groups, using popular signature routing tools, such as Adobe Sign or DocuSign.
- Archiving: Store and retrieve documents effortlessly.
- Automated Renewal Workflows: The system can automatically trigger contract renewal or replacement workflows based on critical dates.
- Seamless Data Integration: Data integration is where CRES truly shines. It seamlessly integrates with any external system. For example, it can integrate with any property management systems (PMS) such as MRI, Yardi, VTS, RealPage, etc. No matter which PMS you use, CRES bridges the gap, ensuring smooth data flow across systems. This may involve triggering specific workflow types based on critical dates of your portfolio data. Imagine a synchronized dance between your financials, lease agreements, and tenant profiles—all orchestrated by CRES.
- Mobility: In a mobile-first world, CRES keeps you connected:
- On-the-Go Tracking: Executives can review and approve workflows using their mobile devices. Whether you’re at a property site, in transit, or attending a meeting, stay informed. Approve lease agreements, track maintenance requests, and monitor project progress—all from your phone.
- Centralized Visibility: Imagine having a control tower for your real estate operations. CRES provides centralized visibility into ongoing workflows via Dashboards. Receive system alerts, view task statuses, and ensure compliance—even when you’re miles away from your desk.
How we can help:
CRES manages any of your customized business processes as well as corporate & departmental workflows so that your organization becomes more productive.
Real estate business processes involve lots of activities by lots of people. Many of our clients had trouble keeping their staff on top of their tasks. With overwhelming tasks, they struggled with keeping track of critical dates and getting things done on time. The biggest issue is the lack of a centralized dashboard, which means one hand does not know what the other hand is doing.
CRES provides an Automation Framework for managing any initiative involving real estate, people, and processes. With CRES Workflow Management, we can help you create an automated reusable work plan for different business processes. With CRES, your productivity is maximized. Contact us for a demo to get started.
About Irfan Butt
CRES Technology – Founder and CEO
A strategic leader with over twenty years of progressive experience in Business Administration, Finance, Product Development, and Project Management. Irfan has a proven track record in a broad range of industries including hospitality, real estate, banking, finance, and management consulting.