ANZ that that investment in technology had not been prioritised , though that soon started to change . “ People across the business are now encouraging us to continue to invest in and focus on digitisation .”
A good example of transformation initiatives that have impacted cycle times and helped de-risk the business was the group wide Forecasting Analytics program , launched in 2016 and developed in partnership with MRI Software . “ MRI is a well-known global platform in our industry ,” Coleman says , “ but less so in the investment management space . We have put our IP into MRI , and that allows us to really draw out the value of this platform .”
In the past Charter Hall was doing this in a bespoke way , fund by fund : this has shifted to a more integrated real-time environment that admits of change . For example , what used to take 10 people 20 days in Excel will now take minutes , like reflecting a future interest rate assumption change across all property and fund valuations . “ We ’ ve significantly improved our risk profile by moving our key inputs , calculations and outputs / analytics into a centralised and controlled environment ,” Coleman says .
A principle he established from day one was to minimise the fixed footprint , whether in infrastructure or people , to minimise capital spend , moving it where possible to operational cost so as to create more elasticity in the business . “ Property cycles go up and down . When we are booming we need to be able to dial up services and capability quite quickly and when they flatten we need to be able to do the opposite . But when you have fixed costs you can ’ t do that so we have been looking at platform- and software-as-a-service ( PaaS and SaaS ) strategies for any new applications or software that we bring on board . I also wanted to transition from on premise legacy platforms , either replatforming in a cloud-based environment or decommissioning them altogether .”
Disaster recovery ( DR ) relying on a secondary data centre , both expensive and of doubtful efficacy , was a case in point . Considerable capital expenditure would have been
www . constructionglobal . com 127