Nikki Paton
Salta Properties
ESG Director
"At Salta I look after, ESG. So that's everything to Environment, Social, Governance but also heavily involved in the asset management of the business. More so over the last few years, particularly around setting us up with the Build-Apps team, to mean that we are a lot more proactive around how we manage our properties, we have a portfolio of 60 properties now.
PIPP.ai transformed the way Salta think about data
About seven years ago, we didn't have an asset register for any of the properties. We were very reactive in how we maintained and upgraded those properties, relying on contractors to tell us when something needed replacement or upgrading rather than having any of the data around it's expected, textbook and life or how it had been used.
We went through a process of auditing all our buildings over a couple of years. And we had as it registers, which cover every single asset included in the buildings, which was meant where I would be much more proactive and plan out, both short term and long term, particularly CapEx expenditure. And we've also been able to use the data for, preparing maintenance contracts in the past as well, meaning that we can be quite prescriptive around what we want maintained and how we want it might change.
Our data in our Microsoft Tenancy
One of the things we particularly like, and our I.T department particularly likes, is all the data lives in our own environment. We have complete control over the data to the extent that if we decided we didn't want to have an ongoing relationship with Build-Apps anymore, we could say goodbye to them. But we wouldn't have to fight to get the data because it's in our environment. So it did require a little bit of upskilling of our I.T team to, understand how all of that worked, but we all understand the, the benefits of it, and it makes us, a lot more comfortable that, no third parties will be getting access to any of our data which, you know depending on what it is, particularly around some of our apps, like, APRILL can be have quite a lot of commercial sensitivity around it.
Work with many PIPP.ai apps and we helped codesign APRILL
We work with a number of the PIPP.ai apps, ADAMM was the first, but we also use SERGII, REMII and APRILL. We co-designed APRILL with Build-Apps, because we saw a need within our business for a tool to help us manage, the different stages of the development lifecycle and manage the, the workflows and the approvals processes.
So we went to the team Build-Apps and asked if they would help us design something, and APRILL is where it's at now. That's had a huge impact in our business, previously there was really no way of recording what happened at the different stages of the development lifecycle, including who had approved things. Quite often it was decisions made at a meeting or via email, with no real tracking of who had approved decisions, what had been approved. So now with APRILL, which has been adopted by the entire business, and we've been using for about three years now. Is has made a huge difference and for our business has had led to the biggest change. And one of the things is that most people who work at Salta don't understand how APRILL works, so they don't see that the back end of it, what they do see is the canvas upside of it, which is something we had designed by a graphic design, so it's got its own personality. Now people just talk about APRILL as part of our process at Salta and how we do things.
Stand out features include use of AI
Over the years we've seen all the apps continue to be developed and refined with new features, coming on board, including the use of AI now, which I think will make a huge difference to users in the future. And the other thing is the team at Build-Apps is quite open to suggestions from their clients as well on things that can be improved or additional features that might be worthwhile to all their clients."
Sherdian Ware
Chair of SDP
Former CTO/CIO Charter Hall
CIO of the Year 2023
"Hi, I'm Sheridan Ware former chief information and technology officer at Charter Hall and chair of the Sustainable Digitalisation Project.
Barriers in large corporate real estate teams
I think the biggest obstacle to getting accurate information to the right people, in a corporate real estate team, is really just the pure, volume of disparate systems and applications and, frankly, Excel spreadsheets that we have, in the mix. And so, what that means is we've got, duplicated data, often inconsistent data. And I think that just naturally creates a whole heap of frustration, time cost in trying to get it to the right version of the truth. But it also creates risks, within the organization as well.
How CRE executives should approach AI
I think if executives want to start to leverage AI in their business, and they might do that to improve efficiencies or to generate new insights, enhance decision making, or even to improve the experience that their customers and employees have, they going to have to build the right data foundation because if they don't have good data, they're not going to produce any of those outcomes.
so making an investment, in data sets and considering them like intellectual property and an asset is going to be what's required to exploit all those outcomes. And that means treating data like a strategic asset and we need to manage that asset, maintain that asset, mind that asset. As we would any other asset, that a tangible within the organization.
Challenges causing data siloes and unclear data ownership
Every time we had a problem in an organization, we sought to grow and get a different product to solve it. So, it's not unusual to see a 100, 200 or 300 different SaaS platforms popping up quickly. And you imagine that process inefficiencies, data silos, that creates, as well as compliance challenges and different risks. And so, I think we're going to start moving with AI into a post SaaS world that's far more data orientated.
So instead of saying, here's a problem, what product do I need? We'll start to say, what's the people, process and platform components of that problem and that process layer, that data layer. I think we're going to start to see become come out of SaaS platforms and into a more unified layer where we've got clear visibility, not just of our data but also of our processes. I think at the platform layer, we'll just end up with, far less, systems, the big systems, we need to have our systems of record and at the people layer with less SaaS platforms in the mix, we're going to be able to drive to a more unified and streamlined employee experience, which hopefully translates into a much more streamlined and engaging customer experience. So, I think as we move into that post SaaS world, in order to leverage data and AI, we're going to have greater control, we're going to have reduced costs and, and less risk within the average organization."