Reducing Time-Related Costs With TARGIT
Brazil’s real estate market has faced many challenges in today’s economic climate, including a decreased number of new businesses hitting the market, low job availability, and lack of confidence from business owners. To stay afloat, the real estate market has looked for new tools to improve business processes and remain profitable. It was the promise of streamlined processes and easier data management that drove EBM to invest in TARGIT Decision Suite.
“We faced the crisis period very carefully, and one of the difficulties we had was the management and consolidation of information of the entire corporation for the analysis and management by the directors,” says Bruno Thomaz, Former Financial Manager and Controller, EBM. “There are thousands of data scattered on endless spreadsheets, and being able to be assertive in the decision making was not an easy task.”
After looking at several options to optimize internal processes and make the conglomerate management more dynamic, the holding company decided TARGIT Decision Suite was the best fit for EBM’s needs. The idea was to integrate a technology that could cross information from all areas – from administrative expenses to final billing.
Since integrating TARGIT Decision Suite in 2016, EBM has strengthened the company strategy despite the economic uncertainties. The organization’s future plans for growth are now within reach. With company data well taken care of, EBM has been able to turn its focus to various other opportunities, such as investment in new projects and portfolio diversification.
EBM was already on track to earn R$ 400 million after just one year with TARGIT, in addition to having already accumulated R$ 1 billion in General Sales Value (GSV).
“We’ve been able to reduce time-related costs and improve EBM’s productivity in all areas,” says Thomaz. “Today, we have more accurate data, where the monitoring of all projects is carried out daily within the macro project. In the beginning, the solution was implemented in the financial and commercial areas only. Today, TARGIT has been implemented throughout every area of the company.”
Time reduction, quarterly accounting closure (carried out annually before), and crossover of administrative expenses versus billing were all near-immediate benefits of EBM's TARGIT implementation. Headquartered in Goiânia, EBM currently works not only as an incorporating company but also as a construction company and with land division and real estate sales. EBM is also a management and marketing company.
“We have been acting strongly in Goiânia and Brasilia since 2009," says Thomaz. "Now, we are working on a project for the interior of São Paulo in cities such as São Carlos, Araraquara, and Campinas.”
TARGIT Training
As TARGIT Decision Suite was rolled out at EBM, various directors and managers from each department took place in TARGIT training, with the intention of enabling managers to be able to build their own data cubes. Users wanted to be able to create and analyze the company’s complex spreadsheets, such as P&L.
“These types of spreadsheets are difficult to handle because our company is quite software-intensive,” says Kaio Sousa, IT Coordinator, EBM. “We have several systems that collect information from financial, commercial, accounting, payroll, and sales. And how to make all these systems communicate in a way to get the information to the P&L spreadsheet? How to generate management charts and information? The answer was quite easy. In terms of cost-effectiveness, TARGIT was able to integrate all our systems into one.”
Allan Pires, CEO of TARGIT for Latin America & Texas, says that one of the gains with business intelligence is in information building and/or migrating – easily and quickly – from multiple software systems to the TARGIT platform. In other words, TARGIT Decision Suite allows non-dependence on other systems for building micro and macroeconomic analyses. Migration is instantaneous.
Directors and managers at EBM can view and make real-time changes to a project, such as changing a development launch date. In addition, EBM has created a committee responsible for formatting and choosing data visualization layouts, among other TARGIT-focused activities.
Pires highlights that the market is increasingly receptive to data mining solutions. “With BI, companies no longer need to look into the future in the rear-view mirror. It is possible to bring extremely complex areas to the world of charts and management numbers, and this process only tends to improve with time. The new formats offer more subsidies to managers and directors, given their competitive capabilities.”
