How modern BI elevated a major property developer

Moving from traditional, out-of-the-box data and analytics tools to a modern BI platform not only allows you to get better reports and dashboards, but gain a new competitive advantage. 
 
That’s one major property development company’s belief, at least. And during a recent Domo-hosted webinar, Wood Partners’ business intelligence manager, Ritwik Bhatia, made that feeling clear. 
 
“We’re really proud of the fact that (in the last three years) not only have we built the type of reporting experience we wanted to build,” said Bhatia, “but it was so easy for our property directors to buy in, and for our asset management team to use it—and we’re seeing the results.” 
 
Wood Partners started its journey toward becoming a modern-BI-driven organization when key figures within the Atlanta-based enterprise noticed or acknowledged that consequential decisions were being made across the entire business based on data that was a few days old and a lot of times no longer relevant.  
 
At the same time, they concluded that Wood Partners needed to be more proactive and “not just wait in the passenger seat and see our business unfold before us,” Bhatia said.  
 
One of the key steps at that stage—if not the biggest step in the whole, transformational process to date—involved partnering with Domo, which offered the two capabilities Wood Partners was looking for most in a more modern BI platform: flexibility and customizability.

“We needed our new BI tool to not just be a reporting engine,” Bhatia said, “but to create an experience such that everyone can leverage their own unique backgrounds to call out and act on the insights. And that’s what we’ve got.” 
 
With the platform, Wood Partners also has something that allows the two main areas of its business—property development and property management—to maintain alignment, because “everyone is looking at the same numbers, always, and they’re using things like the chat feature (Buzz) to share cards and reports with each other,” Bhatia said. 
 
The impact of that cohesiveness is now influencing another project: the development of a portal that enables Wood Partners to extend its data to external stakeholders through Domo’s award-winning embedded analytics solution, Domo Everywhere. 
 
“With that,” Bhatia said, “our investment partners have the same reporting and the same dashboards at their fingertips (through Domo’s mobile app) that our property management teams refer to daily. We’re (building this portal) to strengthen relationships and to make sure that the entire process of developing a property deal goes smoothly.” 
 
For organizations that are interested in following Wood Partners’ blueprint, Bhatia said they must first embrace two truths:

• a lot can be accomplished quickly once platform implementation begins … but it’s always going to be an iterative process; and
• the real breakthroughs don’t come until you’ve built a culture of data literacy, wherein everyone believes in the data, knows how to leverage it, and is curious about where it might lead them.

From there, other doors swing open, revealing what else is possible with a modern BI framework, such as the ability to do something that creates bona fide distance between you and your competitors: take intelligent action on data insights, because they are presented at the right time, to the right people, in ways that are easy to understand.

“The aspect (of Domo) we’ve really come to benefit from is how it helps us prioritize,” Bhatia said. “There’s so much in terms of numbers and data in our business that it can be hard to ground yourself. But (Domo) gives us a place to start, and makes it easy for anyone to see in order of priority what assets they need to focus on through features as simple as color-coding.” 
 
Watch the webinar to learn more about Wood Partners’ modern BI journey, including how it has affected the company’s reputation and why it is likely to serve as an even greater driver of growth in 2022.