Learn how SFW and Accendo^® can save you money

Save With Accendo Brochure

Q. How can you save money when the economy is good or bad?

Increase Productivity (out of our control)
Keep expenses down and maximize efficiency (Accendo)

Q. When/Why do I need property management software?

When you need to hire more people to perform repeating tasks
When you want to improve efficiency without utilizing more resources
When you need to consolidate resources.
When you need to create standardization across your organization
When you need to keep up with regulations and standards
When you want to improve accountability
When you need a reliable and always accessible source of information
When you have a lot of information and data to analyze

Q. What is the cost of not having a property management software?

You must always depend on others (employees or vendors).
You may miss contracts / rent renewal dates.
You may miss significant expiration dates on warranties, certifications, insurances and leases.
You may miss deadlines due to labor intensive tasks or reporting needs.
You pay a lot more and wait a lot more for printing floor plans and other drawings.
You have a hard time keeping with regulations that may result in penalties.

Q. How does SFW quantify cost savings?

Straight Forward Equation: Savings (=) the number of hours to perform a task without the software (-) the number of hours to perform the same task with the software (x) hourly rate of the person performing the task.
Calculating Efficiency:
- How fast can you respond to emergency or a maintenance issue?
- How long and how much will it take you or a service provider to rectify a problem?
- What does it take for you to analyze data across your organization?
Improving Allocation of Existing Resources:
- How do you spend your security and safety dollars?
Reducing liability and legal costs: Savings (=) the number of incidents before Accendo (-) the number of incidents after Accendo (x) the average cost of incident.
Calculating increased business: Tenants/clients approval rate or traffic increase due to improved security and safety.

Q. How can the costs of implementation be more palatable in the current financial climate?

Use a risk-free monthly service, which does not require you to purchase expensive hardware or commit to a long term-relationship.
Start small, deal with a few of the major labor intensive issues first. Then start sharing this information / resource in other areas/departments of your business.
Only purchase the modules you initially need, and then build slowly from there.
Implement the system for a few properties first, so you can quantify the return on investment.

Saving Examples

(click links to see content)

Move Management (Savings of $4,000 per move)

When dealing with moving projects, each organization uses different business rules and different processes. However, most moving projects include the following tasks:

Generating a move request through HR or another source.
Identifying the proper space according to multiple variables, such as space size, space type, related department, employee's position and more.
Preparing the space - design, construction, cleaning and furniture.
Preparing the space for IT and electrical requirements.
Setting up security needs, such as keys and access cards.
Setting up customized agronomics and more specialized settings.

Depending on the size and complexity of the move, the time and cost of each move varies. Planned moves can take days and sometime weeks and in extreme situations larger scale moves to new facilities can take months. Most moves require a variety of tools, such as:

AutoCAD or similar applications
Space availability data
Current departmental or businesses space usage
IT and electrical infrastructure mapping
Current employees database

Using the Accendo platform, users can significantly reduce the time and cost of managing moves across the organization. In some cases, the Accendo platform reduced a typical two-week move process to less than an hour. The Accendo allows you to do the following:

Identify available space, based on as many parameters as important for you, such as space size, windows space, space type (cubicle, office...), relationship to existing department or business unit and more.
Print current colored drawings in perfect resolution at any size.
Make layout changes to a space directly over the web and automatically communicate the new specs to all relevant entities. [show me ]
Submit and manage move orders between departments and other related entities. (request IT setup or keys)
Associate the new employee(s) or tenant(s) with the new space.
Calculate the resulting charge-back implications of the new setting.

One of SFW's clients, a call center, used to prepare a 20-people move in a week or more before using the Accendo platform. Working with a professional draftsman, CAD related costs for such a move would typically amount to an estimated $2,500 and will typically require a few tries. Today, the same client can prepare the same move within an hour. Through a more efficient process, some organizations may be able to plan such a move within 3 days (having to identify and explore the space, planning, and space layout as well as getting all entities on-board). With the Accendo, an organization will go through the following:

Identifying the space within Accendo's search engine in less than 3 minutes.
Preparing new layout configuration in less than 30 minutes (including walls, cubicles and furniture).
Plotting all 20 employees within the new space in less than 5 minutes.
Sending work orders to IT, security and other entities in less than 5 minutes.
Printing and changing new space allocation in less than a minute.

The total cost of the move with the Accendo is $60 for a single employee at a $60 per hour rate. Using the same rate for a single employee to do the same move without Accendo, the cost will be $4,000 at minimum (including CAD costs). The savings on one move covers the cost of the system, per year, for this particular client.

Auto CAD - Printing/Finding drawings (Savings of over $100 per instance)

How long does it take you to find a floor plan or a map that you really need?

Do you still have to manually go through rolled up drawings, or heavy books of multiple drawings?
How fast can you identify the best drawing for the layer you are interested in, and how recent is your drawing?
Do you have electronic files of your drawings?
- Can you open them on any computer from anywhere?
- Can you tell if they are the most recent drawings?
Do you have an interactive drawings system, where you can access any drawing at will?
- How easy is it for you to interact with this system, or how easy would it be for your assistant to do it?
- Can you make any changes to your drawings from anywhere, on any computer at any time?
How long does it take you to print a drawing?
- Can you print it at any size without loosing resolution?
- Can you print it in color?
- Can you email the drawing or just a part of it to anyone?
- How much does it cost you to print a "poster size" drawing?

The Accendo platform offers substantial savings when dealing with professional drawings and CAD related work:

Print perfectly colored drawing at any size.
Everyone will be able to work with the same drawings and multiple layers, so you always have the most recent and up-to-date information.
Any user with appropriate privileges can easily make changes to the drawing layout from anywhere at any time (over the web).
Email detailed drawing or a portion of your drawing with one click to anyone. [show me ]
Print a colored "poster size" drawing for less than $30, using Kinko's or a similar service (pay less if you have a large printer...).Among all of SFW's current clients, the lowest fee identified to generate a large scale drawing by professional service outside SFW's Accendo was $130 per drawing.

Charge Back Reporting (Savings of $8,400 per year)

One of SFW's clients in the energy industry used to generate charge-back reports few times a year, because the process took many weeks, requiring spreadsheet and graphical format. The process of generating a reliable charge-back report required the following:

Obtaining the recent space allocation data (spreadsheet) from the finance department
Obtaining the most recent CAD drawings and colored spaces according to their relationships to the different departments
Reviewing the new information with the relevant department heads
Adjusting the drawing to reflect the new changes
Recalculating spaces as they relate to each department
Generating a spreadsheet
Generating colored floor plans according to the new space allocation (typically requires a professional service)

It took less than two days to enter the latest spatial report to the Accendo platform (a one-time process). Moving forward, the company makes all space allocation changes directly over the Accendo platform, typically a transaction of a few seconds of relating a space to a different department.

The old method of generating charge-back reports was slow and often resulted in outdated results. The Accendo charge-back reports and drawings are being updated in real-time; the report is always accurate and current. There is no longer a need to generate a charge-back report, users can simply click on the required report and related drawings to get an accurate, real-time space allocation report. An expensive lengthy task that used to take a few weeks is now two clicks away.

Assuming the use a very low-cost data entry position ($12/HR) to generate the charge-back report, using the old method would have resulted in over $1,400 excluding any CAD work and other burden related costs. The Accendo process does not need any specialized employee and can be done by any user with the appropriate privilege. Assuming six reports per year, the Accendo saves the energy company over $8,400 a year at minimum.

Emergency Damage

Work Orders - Broken HVAC (Savings of $8,800 per year)

One of SFW's clients had such an issue, however by using the Accendo system, they were able to in a matter of minutes complete all of the following stages:

Immediately identify which area was having problems and the unit it related to.
Simultaneously see the unit's specifications, i.e. type, serial number, model & purchase date.
Additionally, see all of this maintenance history on this unit, including the dates and who performed the maintenance.
Easily see what the typical call out cost would be from the previous maintenance records. [show me ]
Also attached is the current warranty information on the unit. Are you still covered?
Finally all the contact information on which contractor deals with this unit.
Within seconds after having all this information in hand, if a phone call to the contractor was unsuccessful, an email containing all of the above information can be sent directly to the contractor, requesting service with an urgency level.
Particularly useful if the manager is not on site for any reason, contained in that email is a map allowing the contractor to go straight to the unit and come prepared with all the relevant information and possible parts needed.

When dealing with this type of issue, what typically can take from several hours to complete can now be reduced to minutes. The possible savings in this circumstance is the amount of time the manager takes to deal with these issues. Assuming a manager earning ($30 per hour), the savings are at least $120 per issue, plus the reduced labor costs of the contractor of at least $50 per hour.

When you multiply these instances of issues, across all the equipment, throughout the whole year (lets assume 1 per week) the total cost savings start at around $8,800.

When you multiply that again by each location the savings continue to grow, which can allow you to consolidate resources, i.e. managers can now look after more than one property due to having all the information available at their fingertips from any location. This will allow you to keep on top of your properties/facilities while maintaining an efficient wage bill each year.

Incidents/Crime (Increase business by $1,000,000 per year)

Renovations (Savings of $18,200 per project)

In an example of a renovation, typically a number of companies get involved at the outset to assist in the planning and execution of the renovation.

It may start with utilizing a project management company to set up budgets and costs for the job. Typically these companies will charge you for the cost of preparing this report. This can cost anything from $5000 or more. Next you will need quotes from at least 3 Interior Designers and/or Architects for the design. Again they charge man hours of the inspection of your property, and request additional CAD drawings from your previous Architect. Additionally, your time is spent showing them the site.

By having all of your appropriate drawings available in Accendo, you can provide remote access to these drawings, and have photos/videos of the space. All of these companies can now clearly calculate the size of the spaces, see the layouts and view and previous elevation drawings or images. This will help you negotiate a discount on the price of the quotation as there is less inspection work they need to carry out and reduce the number of man hours spent by your staff showing them around the space.

In the example of one of our clients, they were able to negotiate a $2500 discount from the P.M. company and save the manager at least 40 hours of work in showing all of the Architects and Interior Designer companies around the site. At a rate of $80 per hour, the savings on man hours was $3200.They also saved at least $2000 in the cost of replicating CAD drawings for each firm. Also the Architects wanted to charge between $3500 and $7000 each for the cost of the quotation. The overall cost savings amounted to at least $18,200, which totally covered the cost of the software for the 3 years. This project was only a third of the overall renovation plans for the next two years, which will result in further savings for them.

Reducing Other Business Costs

When you start to look at the amount and type of information Accendo now holds about your facility / property. You can start to use this resource in other areas of your business to reduce further costs.

With the example of Advertising and Marketing, if you are a business that depends on using floor-plans to market your locations, e.g. Mall, IRET, Bids, Hotels, Conferencing, your marketing department can have access to pull down whatever floor-plans they need at any time, within minutes to allow customers to view the spaces they are interested in. This saving can run into thousands of dollars each year when requests for floor-plans for brochures or websites or other marketing material are now no longer required from your CAD provider.
In the example of budgeting for Capital Expenditure each year, whether its calculating the cost of more employees, or the purchase of new or replacement FF&E, you have all the details of the what you have, so that purchasing can be kept to a minimum.
Particularly in this current financial climate, it becomes all the more important not to miss important due dates when it comes to renegotiating contracts, leases or insurance premiums. Missing these can mean missing the opportunity to re-evaluate and potentially negotiate reduction in premiums, plus identify any areas where you can increase income.
If tracking your depreciation on equipment, to minimize your property taxes is important to you, particularly if you are having trouble getting the information to the accounts department of what has been disposed of and what has been put in service. Then being able to immediately print a quick current report, rather than spend days each quarter going through lots of spreadsheets hoping that the calculations on each line are correct, is where small and large companies can see the most visible bottom line difference. Using Accendo with an easy bar code machine can ensure that every piece of equipment purchased will receive its appropriate depreciated value and this report will help you deduct accurately from your bottom line each quarter, potentially reducing your tax liability. This can possibly run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars each year dependant on the size of your organization. With the example of a hotel in Los Angeles, they estimated at least a variance of 10% between what they accounted for each year and probability what they really had. When your paying a property tax bill in excess of $2million per year it becomes easy to see how you can start saving money within the next 3 months.

Save With Accendo Brochure

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Learn how SFW and Accendo® can save you money

Saving Examples

Learn how SFW and Accendo^® can save you money