Now more than ever, retail brands realize that property management is more than just a cog in the wheel of their daily operations. Instead, it is the foundation upon which they can plan their budgets, charter growth initiatives and find the competitive differentiation to stay adaptable in today's phygital-focused retail marketplace.
Unfortunately, their inadequate control over the property data flow within their organization remains a seemingly insurmountable barrier to digitalizing business processes that are governed by it. For instance, poor property data visibility makes it unnecessarily difficult to manage invoicing, collections, contracts, legal and financial compliances/amendments and more. It also affected team collaboration, document management and customer experience – ultimately reducing the retailer's ability to be competitive.
Even some of the largest retail brands face this "adapt or get left behind" property management situation.
Reimagining PropTech for a leading fashion retail giant
Recently, Aspire Systems delivered an Oracle-based financials integration solution to help one of the largest fashion retailers with global footprints. Having started in 1990, their presence today covers 1,842 stores across 100 shopping malls in 13 countries with a gross leasable area of over 530,000 square meters.
Now, with their workforce of over 9,000 employees and several franchises worldwide, managing lease agreements and transactions took a lot of time and a herculean amount of manual effort. Also, the lack of visibility on landlord payments based on lease clauses and terms was proving to be a challenge – but certainly not the only one. After our initial discussion, we realized that their ecosystem faced other challenges like:
- Difficulty in managing multiple stores with a single lease agreement
- Manual intervention for legal compliances
- Delayed operations due to complicated, non-collaborative workflows
- Poor integration capabilities of legacy systems
In a nutshell, this Fashion Retail Giant to centralize how they manage lease agreements and transactions across several stores at the cost center level. The cloud integration was expected to be seamless to ensure fluid data flow between multiple systems. Considering that IFRS 16 compliance management was still manual, automating this mission-critical process was a huge priority too.
iEstate Leasing solution: Maximizing property data ROI
Aspire Systems proposed the iEstate Leasing solution – covering Lease Management, IFRS Reporting and Integration with Oracle Fusion Financials.
Aspire began reshaping the client's ecosystem to automate and streamline key business processes like lease abstraction, renewals, amendments and retrospective amendments with amortizations /repayment schedules. Based on Oracle OCI Technology, the solution significantly improved the client's lease agreement data quality while triggering the synchronized flow of data – easily accessible by relevant users, anywhere and anytime. It also came with IFRS 16-related journal automation to handle lease capitalization, interest accruals, depreciation and lease modification adjustments.
The project, including the data migration for 2000+ open contract transitions, was completed in just three months - rolled out to seven countries the client was operating in. Within a short period, the Fashion Retailer saw business outcomes, such as:
- Minimal reconciliation effort (period closure activities)
- Easier for the finance team to get data-rich insight into balances
- Massive reduction of effort and complexities in IFRS 16 compliance management
Adaptability and scalability: Need of the hour for retailers
Given the legacy-heavy ecosystem of an iconic retail brand, improving data quality and accessibility for smarter financials management was certainly no easy task. But as an experienced Ora Partner, Aspire Systems was able to deploy the iEstate Leasing solution and help overcome the biggest retail digital transformation challenges.
It shows the importance of adaptable and scalable property management software in the world of retail. After all, data is an extremely valuable commodity to maximize the efficiency of back-office operations – thereby affecting front-desk processes. Centrally managing it is the only way to control day-to-day operations – especially as far as lease management is concerned. Learn more about why iEstate is one of the leading cloud-based PropTech solutions.
