There’s no escaping it: we are living in the era of big data. We are loaded, overloaded even, with metrics and measures, articles, blog posts, and tweets. Everything is chock full of information about how the workplace is quantifiably changing, in which ways, and by how much. It can be overwhelming.
So how can the property sector go about making sense of it all? Corporate real estate in particular is a field that has lagged behind others in harnessing and managing the reams of data available.
What are our company’s costs as a per cent of revenue? What is the cost per full-time employee? The size of the location per worker? Overall, how can we improve real estate performance?
Most companies can assemble the data to answer these questions. But what they really need is for these answers to be meaningfully compared, or benchmarked, against others of similar size and scope to determine where they are on the efficiency spectrum.
Through benchmarking, corporate real estate leaders have a critical tool that they can use to advance the leadership positions of their departments within their companies. Accurate comparisons with other companies demonstrate the trajectory of their portfolios, highlight successes and point out areas for improvement.
Through its introduction of BenchCoRE, CoreNet Global, the global association of corporate real estate and workplace professionals, is filling this market need.
BenchCoRE offers a set of measures and analytics:
? cost per size;
? total cost per size by component;
? operating cost per size by component;
? operating cost per size by component;
? revenue per size;
? size per seat;
? full-time employee per seat;
? seat occupancy;
? single to total seat ratio; and
? virtual as percent of total employees.
Companies that participate in BenchCoRE submit data sets to the CoreNet Global team, which analyses the data, vets any inconsistencies and assembles the information. The data can then be downloaded into reports. All company information is confidential.
In setting up the system, the BenchCoRE team has been careful with the taxonomy and the vocabulary, as many countries have differing values, standards and definitions of terms. Ensuring consistency and accuracy is critical to delivering an accurate final product.
A by-product is going to be a universally recognised set of standards and definitions that are cross-cultural. Once we implement this improvement to the world’s corporate real estate community, we expect that many more companies will be interested in benchmarking.
Ultimately it will allow us to compare the performance of one entity against one or more other entities.
When it is done well, it ?tells us where, how and how much to improve.
Our objective is to leverage CoreNet Global as the only organisation that convenes the entire global corporate real estate community into a repository of insightful comparisons.
We believe this will make the property industry and the companies within it much more efficient.
? A demo will be given at the CoreNet Global Summit in Amsterdam, 9-11 September
Peter Holland is director, benchmarking services, CoreNet Global
