Award cosponsor Elliott Farber of Equis (far right) is flanked (from left) by Lockheed Martin’s Jason Yerkie and Terri Beattie.

Decision support is fast emerging as another area of innovation. Like change management, CRE's strategic ante is upped when it plays a lead role by informing the decisions of business units and senior management - as reflected in the CoreNet Global Applied Research Center (ARC) report on Client Relationship Management (CRM).

LMC Properties' "FutureView" platform for delivery of detailed data to support facility acquisition, expansion and disposition not only was featured in the ARC study released early in 2006, it became a finalist for the Global Innovator's Award.

FutureView is a CRE real-time scenario planning tool. It is an Excel-driven, inter-relational system that is "dependent on business analytics and metrics," according to Terri Beattie, President of LMC Properties. Its multiple algorithms calculate the viability of real estate transactions before they are made, giving the business units a hedge against bad decisions, or an edge favoring good value.

It's an example of taking efficiency to the level of effectiveness in the management of LMC's 82-million-square-foot global portfolio, Beattie told the award judges. "We did an organizational self-assessment with 40 other Fortune 100 companies," she says, "and found that companies need to provide more options and direct linkage to the business plan."

"The real estate cycle is (often) not synched to the business cycle," adds Jason Yerkie, LMC's Senior Strategic Planner. He expresses that disconnect in cycle time, telling the panel of judges that FutureView has drastically reduced the time it takes to do a real estate deal from one month to 30-minutes.

"We have hard-wired long-term impact via FutureView," he claims. Previously "trapped" data that mostly went unmapped is now injected into a rich array of information that tells business units and senior executives if a given asset is needed or not, and at what price.

"It's a robust business analysis and options model useful for any transaction," Yerkie adds. The system accounts for complex variables, or "default values," like revenue, headcount, profit margins, square footage and occupancy costs. These five key variables are vetted at three levels: portfolio, property and metric.

Real-time results are fed back to internal clients within the wide continuum of industries served by Lockheed Martin, so wide that Beattie relates through one instance that the company provides more government IT support than anyone: "Even more than Microsoft."

Yerkie says FutureView provides "instant gratification" because it performs in real time, and because it assesses at different levels across the entire portfolio. The benefits extend to the C-Suite, where FutureView contributed to the CEO's expanded margin goals for the year, he reports.

• Countering sub-optimized decisions
• Long-term impact
• Executing analysis
• Automating analysis
• Bottom-line enhancements

For example, a FutureView portfolio screen compares square footage, cost, sales, headcount and profit margin across a five-year span to determine the viability of a transaction or other related asset questions. These types of findings also tie into financial reporting. "It's a good SOX tool, too," Yerkie offers.

"Affordability and larger business strategies come into review" as a result of the breadth of data tabulated and analyzed.

• Real estate and business projections
• Portfolio level
• Variances (baseline and user input)
• Margin impact
• Affordability (user margins and sales input)
• Results (with user input at portfolio level)
• Year-over-year variance(s)

Yerkie also explains how the platform can be used on the property management level by "reverse engineering" the portfolio level. "Depreciation is baked in," he relates resassuredly about the complexities of amortization.

So far, FutureView has "influenced decision makers to select real estate options that mitigated the addition of 500,000 square feet and $30-million in annual operating costs from the company's portfolio," Yerkie summarizes. "Along with these benefits, the number of options evaluated for a real estate transaction has increased by 15%."

FutureView has become one of the premier new decision support tools of the year with good reason: It's far and away one of the most in-depth resources to manage the entire life cycle of an asset, which in this day of increased global supply chain focus is an asset in itself.