Does your company view real estate as an asset, or a necessary evil? What if everyone in the company could collaborate seamlessly, all pertinent departments could synchronize corporate real estate (CRE) activities in real-time, and executive management could gain visibility to it all with one solution?

There are many point solutions on the market today that address specific functions like occupancy management, lease management, and project management. However, to realize substantial returns on their information technology investment, companies are beginning to demand an integrated solution that extends CRE to connect the whole enterprise.

Across all industries, the Internet has opened the door for more collaboration than ever before. This is especially true in CRE. Today, most CRE activities are manual and paper-intensive, leaving business-critical information locked in enterprise silos.

Operations, finance, marketing, HR, and the executive team each manage their piece of the CRE cycle through separate systems, and in relative isolation from the others. This essentially eliminates the possibility for management to make timely decisions that reduce costs, increase operating efficiency and improve financial operating performance.

Recently, a unifying concept known as eCRE has begun to radically transform the traditional approaches to handling leased and owned real estate. Just as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools enabled companies to optimize customer-related processes, eCRE is now providing an end-to-end framework for unifying and proactively managing every aspect of the corporate real estate process.

eCRE recognizes that there are a number of recurring, enduring and transitory elements that form the bulk of the process. Instead of treating each critical activity as a distinct and unique non-recurring event, eCRE provides a comprehensive framework for linking all the individual elements - site selection, site acquisition, construction and build-out, occupancy management, facilities management, and disposition / relocation management, among others.

For most companies, the lack of an integrated enterprise-wide CRE software solution can cost literally millions of dollars. For example, when a major manufacturer recently moved its corporate headquarters, it selected a state and county known for a propensity to award three times the national average for lawsuits. The decision-makers waited too long to bring in the legal department to gain its perspective.

In contrast, some companies are taking advantage of today's technology to connect their CRE activities to the rest of the enterprise. By turning to BayLogics' SiteSeer Suite, Bed Bath & Beyond was able to automate its lease management system to streamline its operation, ensure accuracy and help budget for new sites.

For example, Williams Sonoma, with $1.8 billion in annual revenue and 410 facilities, felt the challenges of timely lease-related payments. Implementing the BayLogics' SiteSeer suite saved the company $800,000 per year on lease-related expenses.

For medium and large companies, the cost of leasing and managing real estate investments represents one of the top three financial expenditures. Increased visibility can directly affect the bottom line.

As companies weathered the economic storm of 2001 and emerge stronger in 2002, we believe most will eventually implement a software solution that not only allows them to manage the entire CRE cycle, but that will eventually be integrated with other software throughout the enterprise and beyond.

Sam Borgese is president and CEO of BayLogics Inc. You can contact the company at www.baylogics.com.