ith 70 million sq. ft. (6.5 million sq. m.) of space spread across its global real estate portfolio, Whirlpool Corp. needs a robust system to keep track of facilities and implement real estate strategies. For more than two years, the Benton Harbor, Mich.-based appliance manufacturer has been using Jones Lang LaSalle’s OneView dashboard productivity tool and is thus far pleased with the results.
Carl Nedderman, Whirlpool’s corporate director, global real estate,
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| Carl Nedderman is Whirlpool’s corporate director, global real estate |
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| David Johnson, Jones Lang LaSalle’s CIO |
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| Howard Kramer is the global program manager for OneView |
says the tool has become an invaluable asset for his company’s real estate staff of seven.
“We use it to track project activity globally and we also use the information it provides to track progress toward our financial objectives,” Nedderman says. “We use it for communications within our business units and to leverage the strategic importance of our real estate. It allows us to develop the financial metrics that are of interest to our CEO or CFO or executive committee by tracking where we’ve been and our contribution and what we project that we can contribute for the year.”
Nedderman’s staff used OneView this spring as a resident database depository for information related to Whirlpool’s acquisition of Maytag.
“The database allowed us to speed up the transaction velocity and execution,” Nedderman says.
That data feeds into such decisions as the company’s May 10, 2006, announcement that it would close three manufacturing facilities, an R&D center and an administrative office formerly operated by Maytag, expand at two high-performing Whirlpool plants in Ohio and consolidate administrative staff in all three NAFTA nations.
Whirlpool’s real estate department continually updates how it uses OneView, adding enhancements to stay on the cutting edge. One improvement Nedderman would like to see added to the system would be the automatic sending of reports to the company’s business units. But overall, OneView has been a major asset, he says.
“I don’t know how we would function globally with such a small real estate team without such a system,” Nedderman says.
OneView was developed in 2004 for a few Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) clients and was made available to the firm’s full client base in 2005. It allows clients to pull information from JLL’s system, their own systems and systems of other service providers for tasks such as integrated program management, workflow management, lease administration, space/move management and project and facility financials.
David Johnson, Jones Lang LaSalle’s chief information officer, says OneView is constantly evolving as new capabilities are added.
“It originated to answer a single question for our clients and that is ‘What’s going on with my portfolio?’ and ‘What are you doing for me, Jones Lang LaSalle and how are you performing?’ We developed OneView to integrate our systems to provide information, reporting and analysis around our performance to the client so they don’t have to search for it.”
Johnson says OneView has evolved into a performance-based full reporting system that answers a lot of questions for clients and helps them link business strategy with real estate strategy.
OneView is currently used by 17 JLL clients, many of them large global corporations that, like Whirlpool, are adding functions to the system.
Future enhancements to OneView will include a threshold-based analysis that will issue a report, for example, if energy costs exceed 10 percent over budget.
As new capabilities are added by clients, they become part of JLL’s OneView “catalog” and made available to all clients.
Howard Kramer, JLL’s global program manager for OneView, says the system is an easy one to learn and can be mastered with a couple of hours of training. He says the growing OneView catalog has become a valuable resource.
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