Servihabitat offers full management services for development and mortgage loan portfolios, as well as real estate assets along the entire value chain. An extensive commercialization sales network (with nearly 6,000 points of sale) and the support of more than 2,000 associated estate agents, give Servihabitat an unparalleled presence throughout Spain, managing more than 221,000 real estate units and 18 billion € in financial assets.
With so many assets in its portfolio, a huge amount of data from a variety of areas are generated: transactions, registry data, judicial proceedings, financial asset information, to service & maintenance activities and more. Every day, Servihabitat faces the challenge of managing this vast volume of data, dealing with the complexity of different formats and sources, and delivering information in real-time to their customers and stakeholders. Companies of the caliber of Goldman Sachs expect top quality, real-time information service from Servihabitat; only solutions based on the latest technology can make this possible.
Today, information flows seamlessly from internal and third-party systems to Servihabitat and from there through the value chain to its clients, thanks to the big data solution implemented by Clariba.
OBJECTIVES
Deploy an advanced data integration and analytics solution capable of ingesting, transforming and combining data coming from a variety of internal and external sources to provide clients with a trusted, reliable and insightful view of the status of their managed assets in real-time.
The desired solution was to be able to transform what was previously a 2 week long manual process into a real-time, on-demand solution capable of providing a full picture of all managed assets for its customer Goldman Sachs with over 17.000 assets, combining data from 4 different sources, including:
Municipal, land registry information and description
Judicial proceedings and status (external system – SIREC)
Internal data: accounting value, market value, managing agency, …
Manual files
Some of the main challenges to be solved included:
Management of massive external files (~2GB each, 60+ flat files)
Standardization of processes
Implementation of complex logic for the integration of the various data sources
APPROACH
Clariba and the Servihabitat team analyzed the existing organizational structure and interacted with business users and the IT organization to build a joint team capable of deploying a successful analytics project.
The complexity of the project required the team to perform an initial thorough analysis of all tasks, evaluating:
The clarity of the required task at the beginning of the project (development speed)
The importance of each task to achieve the project objectives (quality/impact)
The estimated effort and dependencies of each of the tasks (development cost).
With this information at hand, the team was then able to classify all tasks considering the tradeoff triangle (see picture below). The team then proceeded with quick-wins first. Unclear and tasks with dependencies were left for future stages, leaving sufficient time for additional analysis, while delivering results to the Servihabitat business team early on.
Figure: Tradeoff triangle: Speed, quality, cost
CLARIBA ACT-IN FRAMEWORK
With Clariba’s experience gained during more than 18 years of successful delivery of SAP-based analytics solutions across different industries, Clariba combines its practices in an end-to-end process methodology and technology framework — the Clariba act·in | framework to deliver customers reliable and state-of-the-art analytics solutions.
By applying the Clariba act·in | framework which unifies development objects, visualizations, good practices, data connectors and a unique user-centred design (UCD), in an agile development process, Servihabitat and Clariba executed the project on time and with the expected outcome defined as objectives of the project.
Agile - SCRUM methodology was chosen to ensure alignment with users’ needs, and small sprints with continuous deliverables ensured the project’s outcomes were continuously tracked and validated.
TECHNOLOGY
The implemented technology stack included as key components:
SAP ERP
SAP HANA Database 2.0
SAP BW on HANA 7.5
SAP Data Services 4.1
THE RESULT – TRACKING CORPORATE GOALS
The advanced analytics solution delivered by Clariba has saved thousands of hours of manual work for Servihabitat. Data consolidation processes, which previously required 2 weeks of manual work, are now fully automated, and Servihabitat’s tier 1 customers are receiving the best possible service.
After this critical success, Servihabitat is now extending the solution to its entire customer base, providing them with an unparalleled real-time service, not seen in this industry before.
Clariba and Servihabitat have become agents of value in the real estate industry by not only creating internal efficiencies, but also automating mass delivery of information through the value chain.