Embedded Analytics for Property Management: Socienta’s Success Story with Yellowfin
Background
Socienta is a proptech company that provides an operational performance management software-as-a-service (SaaS) product for property and association management companies.
Founded in 2019, Socienta’s digital solution offers specialized operational modules (accounting, customer experience, finance, leasing, procurement/vendor management) to help their customers manage anything from one to hundreds of real estate properties, all in one platform.
Socienta’s ongoing mission is to empower accountants, procurement teams, customer experience teams, tenants, and landlords to modernize their real estate operations. As part of this mission, Socienta decided to add a business intelligence (BI) module to meet data and reporting requirements of its clients, and selected Yellowfin based on a number of key criteria.
“The JGU team and Yellowfin developers helped us with building the data model, the ETLs, everything. Yellowfin’s main advantage proved to be the white labeling and embedding it into our solution, which was too complicated for Power BI. Its multi-tenancy features, and the commercial value when it comes to partnership with Yellowfin, was also much easier.”
Ghassan Talhouk, CEO, Socienta
Challenges
Greater business visibility and centralized business intelligence
Many businesses in the property management industry face recurring data-related obstacles caused by the fragmented nature of their operational software. Because important data is typically stored across multiple separate business systems, the ability to access, share and analyze is often not fast or easy as it should be. This leads to certain challenges, including:
- The proliferation of data silos, which are costly and difficult to access
- Manual, time-consuming data preparation and insights processes
- Lack of general visibility over the business, for better data-led decisions
Previously, some of Socienta’s clients would rely on Socienta to provide reporting and insights for their decision-making, as their existing tools could not provide their desired level of visibility. However, as Socienta had to manually source data from their client’s disparate systems and create customized reports, data was often obsolete by the time the reports were produced.
“The major challenge, for us, was giving visibility for our clients over their business information from one single place, and in an economical way,” explained Ghassan Talhouk, CEO at Socienta. “Economically meaning we develop it once, and then they can use it forever. This challenge is where we started on our journey to finding a business intelligence solution.”
Solution
White-label, embedded analytics with Yellowfin
In 2021, Socienta assessed competing operation management systems in its region and decided to embed a business intelligence solution into its existing software platform to meet its customers’ data requirements, basing its choice on several criteria, including, but not limited to:
– Easily accessible dashboards and data visualization
– White-labeling and embedded analytics capability
“Day one, my strategy was to have a BI solution, because the ultimate goal for Socienta was to reach a place where we can do bench-marking and correlation,” said Ghassan. “When we built and expanded the software over time, BI dashboards were always a module we had in mind.”
During their solution search, Socienta’s decision came down to two competitors: Power BI and Yellowfin, based on their ability to meet the various data challenges their customers faced, and ability to future-proof and streamline Socienta’s offering with sophisticated data analysis tools.
“We wanted to be different from the competition, and change from only being an operation management system to becoming a decision support system”, said Ghassan. “To do this, we wanted to add a business intelligence module on top of our existing software, and create dashboards whereby anyone within the customer experience level, in any management company, can understand everything that’s happening in their company or their communities that they manage from the financial, occupancy level, and performance level.”
To help Socienta on its journey, Yellowfin’s EMEA regional partner JGU engaged Socienta in early 2021 to help them understand the potential of Yellowfin BI vs Microsoft Power BI – and how it could better meet their requirements.
“I looked at Power BI because I was a long time Microsoft employee for nine years,” explained Ghassan. “So I knew Power BI really well. It was then, when I was talking with Eric Tausend (Data Analytics Strategist at JGU), he said, ‘Let me show you Yellowfin – you’re going to like it.’”
Implementation
Better data preparation, multi-tenancy and BI dashboards unlocked
Ultimately, after further consultation with JGU, Socienta decided to purchase Yellowfin core licensing (read more about Yellowfin pricing) in October 2021, and quickly proceeded with its integration plans, spending six months to embed Yellowfin, integrate databases and build tailored dashboards for its clients’ needs.
“The technical implementation, honestly, was relatively easy,” said Ghassan. “The JGU team and Yellowfin developers helped us with building the data model, the ETLs, everything. Yellowfin’s main advantage proved to be the white labeling and embedding it into our solution, which was too complicated for Power BI. Its multi-tenancy features, and the commercial value when it comes to partnership with Yellowfin, was also much easier.”
As Yellowfin was embedded, Socienta’s teams were able to build dashboards relatively quickly, and quickly understand and leverage Yellowfin’s strengths to streamline the overall implementation: “JGU and Yellowfin worked with us to do some real use case scenarios and train our team on them as if it was their own project. We tackled the project as partners.”
Results
Decision support platform with embedded BI
Socienta has successfully evolved its SaaS platform from only an operation management system to a decision support system using Yellowfin embedded analytics, and has built its new business intelligence module to offer several new capabilities and benefits for clients, including:
– Fully embedded dashboards and expanded data visualization capabilities
– Tailored reporting for property management clients for a seamless user experience
– White-labelled BI that looks and matches Socienta’s existing platform
Socienta now offers analytics capability to its customers through its newest module, Socienta Business Intelligence, which includes a collection of dashboards purpose built for its clients’ use cases, including Profit Dashboard, Property Dashboard, and Property Management Dashboard.“Today, our clients can now click and look at a dashboard and start drilling down from the highest to lowest hierarchy to see the cause of a problem by property, country or area,” explained Ghassan. “As an example of something nobody else is doing, Socienta’s BI module measures carbon footprint, and a CEO can track and see this year over year, and drill down to discover the ‘why’. This applies to everything from snagging to maintenance issues to occupancy; a CEO can quickly learn of the occupancy of their buildings, down to the level of a floor in a building.”
Internally, Socienta has also leveraged its Yellowfin implementation to improve its own processes: “We built an internal dashboard using Yellowfin to monitor our clients’ usage of the new BI module – it has helped improve our customer experience by analyzing usage of certain dashboards and features, and streamline the development of our product,” said Ghassan.
The most popular feedback about Yellowfin from Socienta’s clients? “Our customers like the simplicity and visuals of Yellowfin,” Ghassan explained. “We built it in a very simple way.”
Future
Socienta intends to leverage Yellowfin’s automation and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features, such as Guided NLQ, as its customers’ data needs evolve, its knowledge of the product grows, and the property management market continues to shift towards AI analytics.
“Today, many of our clients tell us they want AI, but we ask, ‘what’s your use case’? For Socienta, we want to use Yellowfin’s natural language query for bench-marking, correlation and predictive maintenance – to better know what’s going to happen,” said Ghassan.
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