Regency Centers Corporation Upgrades Enterprise Applications and Accelerates Year-End Expense Reconciliation and Billing
 
 

Regency Centers Corporation Upgrades Enterprise Applications and Accelerates Year-End Expense Reconciliation and Billing

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Regency Centers Corporation is a leading national owner, operator, and developer of grocery-anchored and community shopping centers. As of September 30, 2011, the company owns 367 centers, totaling nearly 50 million square feet, located in top markets throughout the United States. Founded in 1963 and operating as a fully integrated real estate company, Regency is a qualified real estate investment trust that is self-administered and self-managed, operating from 17 regional offices around the country.

Regency grew rapidly over much of the last decade. To keep up with the monthly and yearly administrative processes required to manage thousands of tenants, including reconciling yearly pass-through expenses, Regency upgraded to Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Version 9.0 and deployed other Oracle products, such as Oracle Imaging and Process Management and Oracle BI Publisher, to streamline invoice processing and reporting. Regency worked with its trusted Oracle Partner Information & Computing Services, Inc. (ICS) on the upgrade and configuration, working to minimize customizations, which will simplify IT management and maintenance efforts moving forward.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Regency Centers Corporation

  • “We have realized numerous efficiencies with Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0, particularly around tenant billings. It accelerates our year-end expense reconciliation process and enables us to create and process billings more quickly.” –James Chiang, Vice President of Real Estate AccountingRegency Centers Corporation

  • Ensure continued support of vital business applications that drive the real estate developer’s key business processes, including property management and tenant payment processing
  • Streamline year-end expense recognition and calculation, enabling faster tenant billing
  • Move to a Web-based platform to deliver greater mobility and convenience to employees
  • Minimize system customizations to reduce IT management costs and burden moving forward

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Worked with Oracle Partner ICS to upgrade to Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Version 9.0, migrating to a more user-friendly, Web-based platform and realizing numerous new efficiencies in property management and tenant payment processing
  • Improved the organization’s ability to efficiently and accurately manage complex expense scenarios with the expense participation capabilities in JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Real Estate Management 9.0
  • Enabled faster and more accurate tenant billing for year-end expenses, accelerating collections of millions of dollars in revenue
  • Gained full audit and drill-down capabilities that facilitate understanding various aspects of calculations for expense participation generation
  • Accelerated and improved vendor invoice accuracy with Oracle WebCenter Imaging, which increases process integrity by identifying potential duplicate bills while enabling rapid approval of electronic invoice documents
  • Helped to ensure on-time payments to hundreds of vendors, including contractors and utilities, despite a 40% reduction in accounts payable staff over the last 10 years
  • Leveraged Oracle Essbase to generate monthly production statistics, benefiting from the solution’s ad-hoc query capabilities, which are especially useful during the month-end financial close
  • Gained the ability to print accounts payable checks during a business continuity check or disaster recovery situation with Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher, eliminating the need for a third-party tool that required a separate printer and supplies
  • Worked with ICS to configure the system to the company’s requirements while keeping customizations to a minimum and to make future upgrades and IT management easier and less costly

Why Oracle

A long-time JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customer, Regency is dedicated to working with Oracle as its primary back-office and operations IT vendor.

Implementation Process

Regency upgraded from JD Edwards Version 8.10 to 9.0 over a period of nine months. The project included both a technical upgrade and a complete redesign of the presentation layer to a Web-based solution.

Partner

A long-term Regency partner, Oracle Partner Information & Computing Services, Inc. has been involved in many of Regency’s major upgrades. During the upgrade to Version 9.0, ICS helped Regency to configure the system to support its unique needs. “ICS has incredible technical and system expertise and continues to be an invaluable partner,” said James Chiang, vice president of real estate accounting, Regency Centers Corporation. “ICS works with Regency so seamlessly, in fact, that it is sometimes hard to distinguish our ICS consultants from Regency employees.”