Fundamentally rethink how your building works in order to improve tenant service, cut operational costs, and become a world class competitor! This Presentation delivers essential tips for improving building processes to stay competitive in a buy and hold economy.
Presented by: Faraz Memon
What is Business Process Re-Engineering? Why is now the time to Re-Engineer your operations? How to find and locate operational areas to improve upon. The first steps to Re-Engineering your process & benchmarking. How to approach technology decisions & data migration. The best practices for Business Process Re-Engineering
Register to view presentation On-Demand:
http://be.buildingengines.com/Reg-Webinar-On-Demand-BusinessProcess-Reengineering.html
2. Faraz Memon
Principal, REdirect Consulting
About Faraz:
Mr. Memon brings over a decade of experience focused on
implementing technology solutions in the real estate market.
Faraz has worked with a wide breadth of real estate companies to
develop creative solutions that address the unique needs of each
business, leverage technology to streamline business processes,
lower total cost of ownership and increasing the bottom-line.
Prior to joining REdirect, Faraz managed the operations for real
estate applications at a global owner/manager based in NYC and
also spent several years in the consulting department at Intuit Real
Estate Solutions (IRES) working on a wide array of MRI projects
and systems implementations.
3. Business Process Re-engineering
Improving financial & operational performance of your building
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Sarah Fisher
sfisher@buildingengines.com
Director, Marketing & Communications
Building Engines
4. Business Process Re-engineering
Improving financial & operational performance of your building
Today’s Webinar Topics
• What are key industry or technology trends
driving change?
• How do you define business process re-
engineering?
• How and why do companies decide to take
a serious look at their processes, and how
do they get started?
• How do you advise companies to approach
such areas as benchmarking, data
migration and overall management of
operational changes?
5. Business Process Re-engineering
Industry trends impacting operations
Hold time for real estate has increased.
The result? A focus on…
• Cash Flow
• Operational Efficiency
• Asset Performance
6. Business Process Re-engineering
Approaching improvements to building operations
Performance Issues:
• Reactionary Operations
• Lack of systems and
Processes
• Too manual / not replicable
7. Business Process Re-engineering
Business Process Re-engineering
Technology Adoption in Real Estate
Technology Adoption in Real Estate
Accounting
Vendor
Portal
Facilities &
Maintenance
Management
Tenant
Portals
Investor
Portal
Leasing
Green
Technology
8. Business Process Re-engineering
The impact of consumer technology adoption on business
Mobile Access to Information:
• Smart Phones
• Tablet PCs
• Laptops
Higher Demand from Staff/Clients:
• Administration
• Leasing Agents
• Facilities & Maintenance Staff
• Executives
• Tenants!
Technology = a competitive advantage!
9. What is Business Process Re-engineering?
“The review and redesign of daily processes to achieve
dramatic improvements in performance, cost, quality,
service and speed”
• What are we doing day-to-day?
• How are we supporting our clients?
• How do our operations support our business goals?
• How do we handle internal communications?
• How do we handle external communications?
10. Business Process Re-engineering
Common Triggers
• Have not met technology implementation goals
• Unable to meet certain reporting requirements
• Poor tenant retention
• Slow customer response times
• Complaints from staff
• Escalating costs
The Key: Executive commitment to keeping eyes and
ears open to symptoms, complaints, and discussions
within their business.
13. Business Process Re-engineering
Beginning the Process
1 List & evaluate all current systems, information
sources, and processes
Categorize the types of improvements:
2 • Technology based
• Process Based
• Staff/Role Alignment
• Systems Alignment/Expanded Use
3 Executive involvement & buy-in
14. Business Process Re-engineering
Benchmarking & Measurement
Real Estate Benchmarking
Measure current stats for important items:
i.e. acquisitions, tenant service, expenses
Set Time Frame & Goals
Compare percent change since changes
implemented!
15. Business Process Re-engineering
Making Technology Decisions
Be Don’t slap a
technology
Flexible “cover” on your
current
operations
Your
Processes
Customization
Don’t ignore is costly & not
best practices necessarily
in the new beneficial
system
16. Business Process Re-engineering
Approaching Data Migration
• Dealing with the “Excel”
dilemma
• How much history do you
want?
• Be prepared to have less
usable data than you
anticipated & grow from there
17. Business Process Re-engineering
Best Practices
Don’t Panic! You’re going to find problems (many)
Set Goals ! And assign a group/person/executive to police
them
Don’t Sweep it Under the Rug! Don’t be ashamed of
issues. Assign a group/person/executive to police them
19. Faraz Memon
Principal, REdirect Consulting
About Faraz:
Mr. Memon brings over a decade of experience focused on
implementing technology solutions in the real estate market.
Faraz has worked with a wide breadth of real estate companies to
develop creative solutions that address the unique needs of each
business, leverage technology to streamline business processes,
lower total cost of ownership and increasing the bottom-line.
Prior to joining REdirect, Faraz managed the operations for real
estate applications at a global owner/manager based in NYC and
also spent several years in the consulting department at Intuit Real
Estate Solutions (IRES) working on a wide array of MRI projects
and systems implementations.
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today for our Real Estate Operations Masters Series. Today’s topic is Prepared Buildings: reducing your exposure to risk and loss. My name is Sarah Fisher, Marketing Communications Director at Building Engines, and we are sponsoring today’s presentation. This Webinar is part of our ongoing Real Estate Operations Masters Series, where we present expert content from industry leaders on a variety of important building and facilities operations topics, at no charge to you. In addition to today’s webinar, we have prepared other content on this topic including video vignettes, checklists and articles that we will be sharing with you over the coming days and weeks, so please look for those as follow-up to the webinar.
SARAH: Our featured speaker today is FarazMemon, a Principal with REdirect Consulting. Faraz has extensive experience working with a wide breadth of real estate companies including investment managers, property and asset managers, REITs, and institutions. He works with ReDirect Consulting to develop creative solutions to address the unique needs of each business, leveraging technology to streamline business processes, lowering total cost of ownership and increasing the bottom-line. Welcome, Faraz, and thanks for joining us today. FARAZ: Thanks, Sarah. Great to be here and looking forward to the conversation.
SARAH: Before we begin, I want share a few notes with the audience. Our session today is a one-way Webinar, meaning that you will be able to hear us speak, but we cannot hear you. However, you will be able to write questions in the GoToWebinar “Chat” window on the right hand side of your screen. You can also close the chat pane window to see more of the screen. I will monitor the Chat window to answer any logistical questions you might have. We will open the meeting up to Q&A at the end. We are recording this webinar, and you will receive a copy of the webinar, as well as an mp3 version and transcript for you and your colleagues as part of our follow-up after the webinar. This webinar is part of our RE Operations Masters Series. Our next event is on Social Media- what platforms you should be using and how you can utilize it to market to and retain tenants. So keep your eyes peeled for that…
SARAH: And with that, let’s get back to today’s topic of business process reengineering. We’re going to start by talking to Faraz about industry trends, understanding the background for why companies are looking to re-engineer their operations processes, and then move into the specifics of how. As we prepared the agenda today, we thought some of the questions you may have for Faraz include: What are key industry or technology trends driving change? How do you define business process re-engineering? How and why do companies decide to take a serious look at their processes, and how do they get started? How do you advise companies to approach such areas as benchmarking, data migration and overall management of operational changes?
SARAH: Ok Faraz, let’s get started. I’m going to start by asking for your view on the real estate industry as a whole, and what are some of the key trends impacting building operations?FARAZ : A few years ago there was a larger focus on acquisitions, buying and selling assets. And today regardless of where people are in industry whether they’re owners, operators, managers, investors, everybody is struggling with the same issue and that’s really that the hold time for a lot of real estate assets has now increased significantly. And what that’s brought with it is the need and the requirements to essentially analyze, understand, and ensure the performance of these individual assets is up to par and that it’s improving. So people are spending a lot more time looking at their cash flows, looking at the operations of the building, and a lot more detail over the last couple years than they have historically.
SARAH: So what does the need to treat their buildings like assets mean in terms of how companies approach their operations? FARAZ: That’s where it really stems into this discussion here around business process reengineering. So there a lot of firms that traditionally have not focused on these more granular management aspects of their assets. So in a lot of cases they may not have the staff. They may not have the software, the systems, the processes that go around those types of activities. so in a lot of cases from a tactical perspective, from a reactionary perspective they are having to adjust and adjust very quickly. And a lot of cases that doesn’t lend itself well to doing things in the most efficient manner possible. They’re coming back and they’re thinking about what do they need today because their investor or their fund manager or their asset manager or whoever it may be is looking for additional pieces of information. Looking for additional operational information from their properties, from their assets because they need it for their own internal reporting, for their own executives or sometimes for outside parties, investors and such. And they are being requested to provide that information and they don’t have the most efficient way of going about and doing that because it was never really their core competency to begin with from a business standpoint. So a lot of times they’re going back and the executives are just demanding it saying well, we need this and we need it tomorrow. Or we need it next week and we need it as part of our ongoing updates on a monthly basis, but they haven’t really put in the staffing, the processes to then support that. And what that does is it creates a lot more work for people and it’s being done, in a lot of cases, in a manual effort, which is prone then to having inaccuracies, which then leads to more effort and more stress from the people to try and get the right information. So it becomes kind of this vicious cycle of doing things in an inefficient manner, which then becomes problematic for the organization as a whole.
SARAH: Another key underlying factor, before we get to the details around business process re-engineering, is talk to us about your perspective on technology adoption in the real estate industry – where it’s been and where it’s headed. FARAZ: What we’re finding in a lot of cases is that a lot of this started with the back office people. From an adoption of technology perspective not that they were necessarily driving that but they happened to be the foundational areas that needed to be addressed before you could have tenant portals. Before you could have investor portals and customer relationship management systems and tenant relationship portals, and things like that where there can be self-service. So I think the early adopters had to focus in on the back office of getting the leases in. Getting the basic leasing processes there. Getting the accounting all set up so that they could then take the next step. Now as far as the next step is concerned there has been this increasing trend towards adopting technology. And we find that there’s two different areas. One is as we’ve started getting into kind of more of the green technologies and lead certifications and things like that where you’re having to monitor the operations and the facilities of the building in much more detail. In granular level you want to see how much are you spending on your electricity. How much are you spending on your air conditioning. How much are you spending on these different aspects of the opeTechrations of that building. who’s submitting the most work orders? Where are you having problems? Are there specific to certain floors.
FARAZ (continued): The other side of it is just general adoption of technology from a consumer standpoint. if you were to look at technology 15 years ago, 20 years ago it was very uncommon for people to have the internet access that they have today. It was very uncommon for users at home to have laptops. Now you’ve got people with Smartphones, you’ve got people with their tablet PCs, you’ve got people with laptops are traveling, working from home being able to get to this information from anywhere that they need. And from a building operations standpoint, to come full circle, people have become more dependent on technology, more used to having that technology available to them for their personal situation they almost demand it in the business arena. And that then trickles up, trickles down however you want to look at it. You know the staff is asking for it. The leasing agents are asking for it. The facilities people are asking for it when they’re out there maintaining the building. The executives, obviously, are asking for it because they want to have the next coolest thing to show somebody on their iPad that they can see everything that’s going on with their portfolio. So as that’s driven technology adoption in general and the acceptance of it has driven towards the IT folks to where the internal business to say, “Hey, how come we’re not doing this?” How come the next company over, my friend over at company X is able to do this and get this information very quickly. How come we’re not able to do that? And that’s really driven that technology and focus around to building operations as well as operations across the business to adopt technology to then keep up. As well as to try and accelerate their value added proposition, their key differentiators towards their clients.
SARAH: Ok so with that background, now take us through what is business process re-engineering? How do you define it? FARAZ: From a lay persons standpoint it’s the way to take a look at your overall processes through your business. What are you doing on a detailed basis, the granular level. What are we doing on a day-to-day basis? What are we doing to support our clients? What are we doing to support our own business from an operational standpoint? How are we dealing with our tenants? How are we dealing with our own internal communication? How are we dealing with our investors? What are those different processes that go around each of these different areas. Now from a business process engineering standpoint you would take a look potentially at all of these and say these are the different areas where we have opportunities to improve. We know that there’s something broken and usually that’s where these discussions start. You have an executive that is potentially asking for some information, not getting it in a timely fashion, getting it and it’s information that’s incorrect. Or you’re dealing with a tenant, tenants are complaining and saying, why is it taking so long? Why is it taking X amount of time for me to get a response or the response is not correct. There is a reason why you’re taking a look at this business process engineering effort and there’s something that sets it off.
SARAH: Can you tell us more about those common triggers to look for, that should get our audience thinking about addressing possible process issues. FARAZ MEMON: There’s almost no organization that you’re going to go to these days where not a significant portion of that business is being run on some sort of automated systems or some sort of process and application. So a lot of times you can take a look and depending on how some of these technologies may have been implemented if you have as part of that initial implementation certain goals, certain targets. Or they may be just from your business process target that you need to meet certain reporting requirements. In a lot cases they’re called customer metrics or tenant retention. If you’re falling below a certain threshold on your tenant retention. If you’re falling below a certain threshold for customer response time or reporting internally/externally or perhaps productivity. Maybe you have a lot of internal complaints from the staff saying we’re overworked, everything that people are asking for is not the stuff we have the tools to provide. Perhaps you’ve got certain expenses that you take a look at and say, you know what, these cost have continued to escalate month over month, year over year, what’s going on. So there’s a number of different KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. But for in a lot of organizations where they may not have that I think it’s just about having an ear open, listening to the business, and kind of soliciting that type of feedback. I think there was a day and age not too long ago where people would get a bit of an inkling and perhaps hire consultants to come in and say, “You know what, let’s find out what’s wrong.” And I think with the budget consciousness of today that’s typically not there. And so it really takes the management level, the senior management, the executives to keep their eyes and ears open for these types of signs, these symptoms, these discussions that are happening within their business to be able to identify that and figure out what that next step should be. Should we hire somebody to come in and take a look at it. Should we create a task force internally or a steering committee of some sort to then explore that further and figure out what’s going on and how to perhaps improve that process.
SARAH: So once companies start to understand they may have a process issues, what are next steps usually in making a decision to do something about it, such as working with an outside expert? FARAZ : The challenge is always time and money. In a lot of cases today’s dollars are very tight. what people need to look at is that value proposition again. And say, if we got this implemented, we got it implemented in a month or two months or three months or a week, what is that worth to my business. versus struggling with it internally and trying to figure it out. And try to understand what’s going on and learn it and all that without the help of an expert. in a lot of cases having that expertise to guide you in the right direction, to save you from the pitfalls of mistakes that others have made can be valuable several times over.
SARAH: What I’m hearing from you, is it’s very important to consider the cost of not making a decision to change. FARAZ : Absolutely. what is the cost of not doing this today? And I am losing my competitive advantage? Am I losing potential market share. And all of those things in a very competitive market are very important. You can’t afford to be stagnant. And I think to the credit of a lot of real estate organizations out there, commercial real estate organizations in particular, they have adapted. And they have adapted to the changing market conditions it’s the only reason they’re still around. And now it’s that next step. You have to prove that you can operate these properties better than somebody else. You can handle this asset better than somebody else and the only way to do that is to take that next step. Is to look at opportunities to improve both technologically as well as from your own process. And there is definitely a cost to not doing that. And you may not see that in the next month or two months or potentially even in a year But it will catch up to you in the next few years.
SARAH: So once a company makes the decision to move forward with an initiative, how does the process typically start? FARAZ: we go into understanding what people are doing day to day. Typically those are activities that in a lot of cases the executives don’t have visibility into. They may know something’s happenings. They may know it’s being done inefficiently but they may not know the granular level of detail. Where is somebody getting that information from? Is it coming from one source, is it coming from multiple sources? What are they actually doing with that? In some cases the managers may not even know because somebody’s doing it with a lot of people working remotely in different locations. Systems have evolved over time people are using a number of different systems. Some people are still using paper and Excel to do a lot of things manually that they feel that’s the only way to do. So the business process reengineering brings that all together it helps us set that goal, take a look at the details of what is happening and then provide recommendations on how to do it better. SARAH: And how would you categorize the type of improvements that are possible for a business to re-engineer? FARAZ: that can fall into a number of different categories. There can be technology based improvements and there can also be just process based improvements, alignment of roles or alignment of staff within your organization. And then on the technology side it may be things like implementing a new piece of software. It may be that you already have the software and you’re just not using it to its fullest capacity and to its fullest extent. And we find that in a lot of cases, particularly now over the last few years, several people have adopted various platforms of technology. But when you really go back and you dig into what they’re doing they may be using 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent of the overall functionality and then complaining because there’s a lot of effort that’s still be putting into doing things manually even though the answer may be sitting right in front of them. So, as you can see, typically it starts with the executives because they’re usually the ones that are seeing that need or are being informed of a gap or a process improvement area that needs to be looked at. And then ultimately the implementation of it requires their buy in, their sign off either from a dollar spending perspective or just from an implementation and business change perspective. So it’s really important to have them involved throughout the process as well.
SARAH: One of the topics our audience has expressed interest in is the approach to benchmarking, which can get tricky. How do you advise companies approach benchmarking and measurement? FARAZ: I think the way the real estate business has evolved over the years from writing up deals on the back of napkins to being be a lot more formalized now. Versus high transaction volume types of businesses like retailers where they’re looking at things very repeatable processes in a mass quantity. Real estate tends to be the other end of that spectrum. And typically looking at lower volume of transaction but in a much more complex manner. Each deal, particularly for acquisitions and things like that is potentially very complex. Even leases in a lot of cases particularly on the commercial side can be very complex, multi-year deals. So from a process reengineering standpoint a lot of the common terminology that you would see in other industries, things like Six Sigma to measuring and having your different KPIs to look at your business. , what your process started off as and then measuring it again what it finished as so that you can measure the difference. In a lot of cases the real estate industry is just not used to that. That’s not to say that’s it not required. It’s not to say that it’s not necessary. It is and it’s definitely a best practice. It’s just that it sometimes taking that extra step to understand and measure all of that is something that the business from its core function is not always doing today. They may not always know how long it’s taking you to produce a result. Or it may not always understand the different steps and processes that go into a specific area. And that’s really where having the experts come in to help with that will definitely set you a step above. Because at the end of all of these projects you always want to be able to look back and say yes, we’ve accomplished X, Y, and Z. And the only real way to do that is to upfront measure hey, it’s taking us 120 days to close the books. Hey, it’s taking us two days to resolve a tenant issue. Or it’s taking us X amount of time whatever task it may be. And to be able to come back and say we’ve shaved X amount of time off that process. X amount of dollars off of that overall department expense budget. depending on what your goals are being able to come back and measure that and be able to say yes, we had a concrete value added to our business by doing this project. The only real way to do that effectively is to spend some time up front, understand what’s going on, and set up those metrics so that you understand your starting point.
SARAH: The technologies are closely tied to the processes that they support. How do you advise companies that are looking to evaluate technology solutions, vendors, software – how should these companies go about making a technology decision in this new climate? FARAZ : To the extent possible we always recommend that you take a look at the processes first. Take a look at what you’re doing. What you’re trying to accomplish. Both today as well to the extent that you can’t forecast out in the future. And for a lot of these firms there is this evolution that’s happening in their business. It’s changing – the world is changing, the U.S. economy particularly is changing, and the way we do our business is changing so to assume that you can just take the process that you have today, slap some technology on it, is in a lot of cases a recipe for disaster. And it can be done but what happens in a lot of cases through that approach is that you end up uncovering the technology gaps and the process gaps all at the same time through that one project. And when you do that it becomes very difficult to then give the due diligence that’s required to the process. So understand the process. Take a look at the technology that bests suit your process. And then be flexible. Understand that there may be certain things you want to achieve that can still be achieved in a slightly different way than you’re doing them today or that you were envisioning them. And if you can do that, if you can be a little flexible it will save you a lot of time and money because rather than having to then customize the technology, you’re able to then conform both within your process and then also within the best practice that inherently built into the system. And if you can marry the two together you’ll be in a much better place. You’ll get from start to finish in a much smoother manner. You’ll be a lot happier with the results.
SARAH: Before we get to Q&A, let’s talk about some specific topics with business process re-engineering and software in general. I know that you have a lot of experience with data mirgration. Can you take our audience through some pointers around the keys to making sure data migration is a success when moving to new systems? FARAZ: The requirement for data migration varies from company to company, it varies from project to project. And it really depends on what you have available to you. And I can’t emphasize enough the quality of that data. A lot of times if you’re taking a look at your old processes whether it be data that’s in Excel. In some cases we’ve seen people want to pull data out .pdf reports that they got from the old owner. bringing the data over is half the battle, if you will. The challenge really becomes then what are you expecting out of that data. And what we find in a lot of cases is when you want to take that next step you may have had reports, you may have had analysis that you were doing based off of the data in your Excel spreadsheets. And that may have been very limited. And therefore it worked okay because it was able to give you the information you needed at the time. But if you were to then take it into a system and that system now provides you not two or three reports but 30 or 40 reports or 2 or 300 reports, is that same data sufficient to then produce the results in all of those different scenarios? And a lot of times what we find is that the clients don’t understand that in a lot of cases that data is not sufficient. It’s not there in the level of detail that they really need. Of if it is it may not be as clean as it needs to be because the natural challenge with having that type of data in system like Excel is that it’s segregated. And therefore it may not conform to the same standards. So to get it to conform sometimes you have to take the lowest common denominator, which doesn’t always leave you with enough information on every single iteration of that scenario of that data that you’re trying to get to. Now as far as getting that data in there and the importance to a specific organization, a lot of that depends on how much history you have and how much history you’re willing to get, and how much you actually need going forward. Some people need for their business three years or more of historical information. I’ll give you an accounting example. For people to calculate things like an IRR from the inception date they will need to have their cash flows going back to the inception of potentially that property of that investment. Now that may precede the data that you even have in the system. So if you’re converting from one system to another you may not even have that data available to you because that may go back 20 or 30 years. So sometimes it’s a mix and match of that data. Sometimes it is just trying to live with what you have. Sometimes you need a lot of history, sometimes you don’t. Our recommendation is typically in these situations take a look at what you really need going forward. Not necessarily all the nice to haves historically but take a look at what you really need and start from there. We can go back and fill in historical data if it’s required but if your absolute must have is to do a year over year comparison, then let’s start looking at bringing over two years of data. If that’s not your main thing. If you’re just looking from this year going forward then perhaps you only need to bring in the current data and that will save you a lot of time and effort from a data validation standpoint. It will save you time and dollars from a conversion standpoint. And it just overall will probably make your experience a lot better.
Sarah: Faraz is there was one piece of advice you would give to someone looking to make changes to their processes and drive improvement in their operations, what would it be? FARAZ: When you’re going through this you’re going through it to uncover issues. You’re going through it to find problems. So even though this may have been triggered by a certain topic, a certain issue that came up, as you dig into it more and more you’re going to find other areas of problems. So that opens up two opportunities. 1) Before going in set up your scope, set up your goals. Have some sort of steering committee. Have some sort of executive oversight to keep you in line to make sure that you’re going to stay focused on what it’s for. It’s very easy to then start uncovering a number of problems and then try to solve the world in one shot. you don’t want to necessarily do that. You want to try and stay as focused as possible within some flexible boundaries. But that’s one thing I wanted to just make sure that people understand that as you’re going through this you’re going to find areas that you never knew existed. You’re going to find areas that you’re going to want to potentially even address sooner than the ones that you went in looking for. So keep an open mind, Keep your eyes and ears open. But at the end of the day make sure that you’re sticking true to your scope and your goal for the project if you want to be able to stay on budget. And then also don’t be ashamed of the problems. You know a lot of times people will find issues and then not want to talk about them because they’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed that they’re running in certain ways and a lot of times we’ve gone into these situations where we’re doing interviews with key people and they became hesitant because they don’t want to exposé the issue that they have for sake of embarrassment. And that they’re manager may find out and say why are you doing it this way? Why have you been doing it this way for so long and you didn’t tell me? So it needs to be that top down approach. As you’re going into these initiatives have that executive sponsorship to state you know what, it’s okay. The whole reason we’re doing this is to find those issues. It’s not a problem if you raise it. The only way we’re going to be able to solve it and make it better for you is that if you do bring it to the forefront as we’re discussing these issues let’s not worry about the blame game. Let’s not worry about necessarily how it got there. Let’s look forward and once we’ve identified a problem area look forward to finding ways to fix it.
Sarah: Faraz, is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you want to make sure we cover? FARAZ: Let’s see here. as it relates to business process reengineering one of the things that I didn’t’ mention but I think is important is that a lot of folks will look at this business process reengineering as kind of a one time initiative. You know, let’s go full born. Let’s try and figure everything out and we’ll solve it and then everything will be great. And that’s not really the right way. You know businesses evolve and everybody knows that but just to call to your attention to it that you’re not necessarily going to know what your business is going to look at 3 or 5 or 10 years from now. You may have certain assumptions. You may have a business plan. You may have a target and a direction that you want to go in. But really knew the exact timing of when the market would crash and things like that. And how deeply it would play out and how it would affect our businesses. So you have to take a look at the business process reengineering as an ongoing effort. Always keep your eyes and ears open for those opportunities. Always take a look and say is there something we can do better.
SARAH: Thanks Faraz, anything else? FARAZ: I think I’ve said enough. I’m losing my voice now. SARAH: Ok, Faraz, well thanks so much for sharing your insights today. We’re going to open it up Q&A in a moment, but before we do that, I just wanted to say thanks for sharing this all with us today. FARAZ: Thanks Sarah, and thank you to everybody who’s attended. I appreciate your time and I hope that this has been valuable. And I welcome any questions.
Sarah: We are going to be opening up for questions for Faraz in a minute. You can submit questions via the Chat Panel. While you are preparing and submitting your questions, a few reminders: This webinar has been part of our Building Operations Masters Series, and you can register for the entire webinar series on the home page of our web site www.buildingengines.com. We’ll also include a link for you to do so in our follow-up email communications. Faraz has had some great information which we have converted to checklists and transcripts which we will make available to you as part of our follow up communications. We also had the chance to speak to Faraz about the some additional topics that we will share with you as well in the coming days. We’ll also include segments of this webinar that make it easy for you to share with colleagues inside your organization, on topics that may be relevant to them, and we encourage you to do so. So with that, we’ll open it up to questions.