Property Management Processes and SharePoint
Managing a property portfolio with WEBCON BPS & SharePoint
Introduction
The Max Barney Estate is a family run property company who have been intrinsically linked with central London’s properties for the last 50 years. The Max Barney Estate also encourages tenants to put their distinctive stamp on properties, to express their character and communicate their individual message. This is one of the many reasons why their properties are home to a community of over 1,000 businesses.
The Max Barney Estate also owns Containerville, located next to the Regents Canal. Containerville is described as a home for start-ups and small businesses, made up of 45 containers that are arranged over three floors, and have been up cycled into modern workspaces
Challenges
Max Barney came to Dolphin IT Solutions with a requirement for new business processes surrounding the movement of tenants through properties (both in and out), and organising documents associated with properties, units, and tenants - meaning a full business process management solution, and a document management system were needed. The solution had to be delivered in a short time frame, and needed to integrate with Max Barney’s current systems.
As Max Barney worked together with Dolphin IT Solutions to drive this project to completion, the initial solution has since expanded - with more property and estate management processes being delivered, along with the build out of the document management system into a fully-fledged SharePoint intranet.
Our Solution
Dolphin IT Solutions proposed the combined use of WEBCON and SharePoint for the overall solution; WEBCON to drive the business process management, and SharePoint for the document management system. The reason for this is WEBCON and SharePoint integrate together seamlessly.
Our expert business process developers built out multiple processes for Max Barney which includes:
- Commercial move-in process
- Commercial move-out process
- Containerville move-in process
- OCR Invoice scanning
- Processes to upload data to an external property management system designed by MRI
These processes allow Max Barney to log any details, attachments, and correspondence between themselves, tenants, agents, solicitors, etc.
At specific times in these processes, email notifications are sent out to internal and external parties, with some automatically including specified attachments. Then, using the upload process, which integrates to a system hosted by MRI, our custom-built .NET cloud API runs in the background, to copy new tenant information from WEBCON, up to the third-party platform. This allowed the data to be readily available on all systems used by Max Barney.
Finally, at the end of these processes, finalised and signed copies of documents are pushed to the correct folder within the SharePoint library that Dolphin IT Solutions created for Max Barney. The SharePoint library is loaded with all Max Barney’s properties, along with a specified folder hierarchy under each property.
The processes also allow for the assigning, and re-assigning, of tasks to different colleagues, with dynamic instruction capability, and notifications to employees that they have been assigned a task. For example, to assign accounts to complete specific tasks around tenant bank details - with WEBCON’s sensitive personal data protection, these details will not be available to view to anyone without permissions, and can also be erased immediately to comply with GDPR.
Max Barney’s SharePoint has now been built out to work as a branded, fully functional company intranet, alongside the originally required document management system. The intranet was created as a simple modern SharePoint site, with custom graphics and webparts that allow Max Barney to integrate and interact with WEBCON through SharePoint.
The Max Barney Estate had a specific visual style in mind, so Dolphin IT Solutions built the intranet whilst working closely with a graphic designer who provided us with visuals. To keep the intranet clear and user-friendly, Dolphin IT Solutions split sites into departments, each with a communication site that sits underneath the parent hub site.
Dolphin IT Solutions and The Max Barney Estate have now also discussed further processes that will be used to build out their current business management solution, such as rent reviews, lease assignments and variations.
The original brief expanded on its requirements, and thanks to WEBCON's InstantChange® technology and approach to rapid application development, any future updates to old processes will be reflected immediately.
