Little Real Estate shortens planning cycle time with Oracle EPM Cloud

Summary

Little Real Estate Gains Real-Time Insight, Cuts Budgeting and Planning Cycle Time, and Enhances Business Decisions with Oracle

Little Real Estate is Australia’s largest independently owned real estate agency. With over 21,000 properties under management and 23 offices across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Gold Coast, and Sunshine Coast, Little Real Estate aims to be the best property management business in the world, and deliver genuine and quality services that customers deserve.

Historically, Little Real Estate’s IT infrastructure lacked integration between the financial system and other applications, such as the CRM and the trust accounting system. Finance staff needed to manually input data from multiple sources into spreadsheets, causing data integrity issues for budgeting processes. As part of Little Group, the company wanted to increase planning efficiency and support growth into more diversified businesses.

Products

Business challenges

Eliminate manual data reconciliation from multiple sources and minimize data integrity issues by providing a purpose-built, integrated cloud application for staff to easily access and track revenue against budget across all real estate offices
Improve staff accountability by enabling cost center owners to view and update data directly in the system, such as property management revenue targets, without relying on the finance team to provide the information
Increase finance team productivity and satisfaction by automating the budgeting and planning processes and freeing up time for staff to focus on more strategic projects

Results

Little Real Estate worked with Oracle Partner, DXC Red Rock (formally M-Power Solutions) and Ndevr to assist with the simultaneous implementation of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service and Oracle’s JD Edwards. The process involved discussion with the partners to determine the business needs, model structures, and hierarchies. Little Real Estate then provided various models to DXC Red Rock and uploaded into Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service. The company completed user testing in less than two weeks and went live with the new platform in just 3.5 months.

“The implementation was quick and easy and we didn’t require any extra expertise in our business. Oracle’s teams were really helpful, I’d be happy to go back to Oracle as our business grows and diversifies,” Kerr said.

Cut planning cycle time by allowing Little Real Estate’s finance staff to view real-time data via Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service’s SmartView feature rather than spending half a day to reconcile data
Enhanced decision making by using Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service to build multiple revenue and expense models—including property management and sales—and assess the impact of assumptions, such as free management periods and commission rates, on all the real estate business divisions
Encouraged operation staff to get involved in the budgeting process and take ownership of their cost centers by providing users with an intuitive planning tool to view, update, and monitor performance instead of waiting for finance staff to prepare month-end reports
Created faster and reliable financial reports and provided greater insight to the board on business performance by integrating Oracle’s JD Edwards and trust accounting system and feeding data into Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service to ensure data accuracy
Lowered headcount costs by improving the ability to efficiently allocate tasks across team members and complete the same amount of work with one less staff member
Increased staff satisfaction by streamlining planning and budgeting processes and enabling finance staff to focus on analyzing numbers and providing valuable feedback, such as trending for average property sale price
Enabled the business to achieve payback period in just 1.5 years by moving to Oracle Cloud with easy access to software upgrades and minimizing commitment to capital expenditure and additional resources
Supported expansion into new businesses, such as maintenance service to rental properties, by gaining the flexibility to easily configure and integrate an additional module—Oracle Field Service Cloud Service—with Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service as business grows

Partners

DXC Red Rock assisted Little Real Estate to develop and build various revenue models with Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service. The partner also provided on-site user training and supported users to resolve issues throughout the project.

“We were impressed with DXC Red Rock consultants’ knowledge and professionalism in finance and Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service. This gave us comfort that they were able to understand our needs,” said Natasha Lauricella, financial controller, Little Real Estate. “DXC Red Rock was also very transparent with the project timelines and status. Their support and communication was outstanding from start to end.”