Real Estate Company Benefits from New Hosted Solution in the Cloud
Benefits
- Superior reliability and availability
- Faster document assembly
- Scalable globally, cost-effectively
Prologis is the global leader in industrial real estate, with more than 687 million square feet in 20 countries. The company leases modern distribution facilities to manufacturers, retailers, transportation companies, third-party logistics providers and other enterprises with large-scale distribution needs.
“Market officers can now generate legally approved leases on their own, in a fraction of the time.”
Jason Murphy, First Vice-President and Corporate Counsel at Prologis
Challenge
Prologis managed an operating portfolio of approximately 3,300 industrial facilities across the Americas, Europe and Asia, leasing buildings to more than 5,200 customers. In North America alone, the organization’s market officers generated thousands of real estate leases each year, of which about 80% required the attention of their in-house attorneys. Prologis had built a homemade solution for lease assembly, but it was fragile and hard to maintain, and was eventually abandoned; within a few years, attorneys were back to copying text from a library of templates they maintained for document content.
This manual approach brought several issues such as long turnaround times, inefficiencies, and risks of non-compliance, resulting in lost revenues. Prologis market officers would often need to get a lease immediately into the hands of a potential customer in order to close the deal faster, but they would only receive it after a few days. This delay was due to attorneys having to spend many hours on reviewing the majority of all new leases – and they were doing the same thing over and over again, expending hundreds of hours per year of non-value-added effort. Plus, the risk of causing costly errors during the manual lease assembly process was very high. Even a simple error, such as forgetting to include a schedule of insurance requirements, could potentially cost millions of dollars.
Prologis envisioned a user-friendly solution where market officers could select a few options and fill in basic information to have all but the most complex real estate leases immediately assembled for them. The organization also needed a scalable solution that could be deployed without the involvement of their IT team, busy dealing with a recent merger. Conversations with Forrester Research led Prologis to Experlogix and its cloud solution built on Microsoft Azure, which promised to be the most cost-effective and easiest to implement and use.
Solution
Automating the Assembly of Thousands of Leases
The Experlogix solution developed for Prologis consisted of two main components: a Microsoft Word add-in for creating lease templates and a centralized, web-based portal for managing them. The portal reads the template and generates a web-based form; Prologis market officers use the smart form for capturing the options and information required to automatically assemble and generate a lease document personalized and relevant to each customer.
Prologis mandated Experlogix to design their real estate lease templates, in compliance with their corporate standards. Two weeks after the lease requirements were solidified, Prologis’ new solution was ready to be used by market officers in a way that ensured leases remained error-free. A market officer selects a pre-approved, compliant template, chooses the appropriate options and types in all mandatory information, eliminating the risks of forgetting any information or making any mistakes during document creation.
Building on Microsoft Azure
In addition to rapid adoption by business users, Prologis wanted a scalable solution that would guarantee uninterrupted services, with minimal up-front costs and no IT involvement; Experlogix’s hosted solution fulfilled these requirements.
Experlogix had chosen to build its new cloud solution on Microsoft Azure, as it ensured availability of services at all times and was easily scalable. Because Microsoft Azure is available in data centers around the world, Experlogix can deploy its solutions close to customers as they grow their business in other parts of the world.
If Prologis wants to expand the use of the Experlogix solution beyond North America, Experlogix can deploy to data centers in Europe or Asia to minimize any latency and performance issues.
Result
By building its new hosted solution on Microsoft Azure, Experlogix was able to quickly and cost-effectively deliver all the capabilities required by Prologis: an easily adopted, low-maintenance document generation solution with strong scalability and reliable availability.
The cloud solution from Experlogix gave Prologis the benefits of rapid implementation, minimal up-front costs, no IT involvement, and efficiency gains by saving the organization’s attorneys hundreds of hours of effort per year. Additionally, Prologis transitioned their lease assembly workload to market officers, who can easily create and generate these time-sensitive documents, while being confident that they remain compliant, relevant and error-free