Transcript
Well, I'm Anna Klopfer, head of IT and innovation at Argyle. I look after the IT function and also as part of my innovation role, I like to look at all different technologies, hardware, software, and we're embarking on our AI journey this year as well. Arga is a flexible office provider with over 20 buildings in prime central London locations. We provide our customers with refined unbranded offices, meeting rooms and event spaces and support them with personal service from our onsite team. This system we used before migrating to Yardi was uh, mainly finance system, so not really excellent. When you think of managing flex spaces, it was a bit clunky. The automation was really limited and our customers couldn't do simple things like booking meeting on one line or making a payment. So because we didn't want to have multiple systems, we took a finance system and desperately tried to make it a, um, flex space system. So it was the same system, but the finance people loved it and obviously our front of house teams hated it in terms of it. We had a really good system which provided automation. It was really good for provisioning, but it's totally separate. So our team spent lots of time double keying entry, double keying information into multiple systems and um, having to double check that they're all in line, which obviously a bit of a waste of time For us. The automation's key. So we want something that's gonna work really well and provide automation in the background, which stops our teams from having to manually do tasks, but it also provides us with a really consistent customer experience because the system does the hard work for you and therefore it's not like remembering to have to do something manually. So looking for an all in one system that provides you with that level of automation was really important. Yardi provides us with our finance system, our space management. We've recently moved to do the IT side of that. Our maintenance team uses the facility managers system to keep on top of their tasks and our front of house teams can create audits and log jobs for the team to carry out. Once we selected Yardi as our new system provider, it took us about 12 months to look at all of our data, make sure we cleansed all of our data, and got a project team together to get that all rolled out. And having rolled out a few systems in my, in my life, probably one of the easiest to land with our front of house team, our previous system was super clunky and it really didn't provide any automation at all. So once we started showing our teams the new system and show them all the automation that's available in it, everybody fell in love with it and the feedback was really good. There's nothing I hate more than wasting time and having separate systems, we have to double key information again and again, have to do audits to make sure that all the details matches is just a gigantic waste of time. So having one system that you only put the information in once with the added benefits of lots of automated processes behind the scenes means our team can just click a few buttons and everything is done for them. Ultimately, the goal of any software that we roll out is done with a customer in mind. They may not necessarily know that we've done it, they may not know what the process or the system is, but if our teams are happy, they are more efficient and they can effectively do their jobs, it means they can look after our customers and provide them with fantastic experience. I absolutely love Facility Manager. The quickest and easiest module we've ever rolled out via Yardi from signing up to it to going live was about two months. And we needed a system where we can get our front of house teams to do audits to see if our buildings are looking great and our spaces are ready for our customers to use and should they find anything that's not great, they can log it in the app and immediately a job is raised for our maintenance team to address it really quickly. So huge benefits and absolutely love working with it. AGA was very keen to look at why Yardi Data connect as soon as we heard that it was coming out. Um, so at YAS in 2024, I met a fantastic consultant that we've been working with in 2025 to get the data connect project up to scratch. So they've helped us to do all the scripts to get the data out and we now have some wonderful dashboards and reports that we've just gone live with. So again, for us, massive time saving to not have to do our reporting manually and we can't wait to start using this data and building up, um, lots of data that we can look at to start making decisions. AR goal's, really interested in being a data driven organization and with so much data available in our various Yardi systems, it's great to have a place where it can all sit together on one dashboard so we can use it to really shape the future of our goal. The different departments have been always doing their sales report or their finance report and so on, so it's really labor intensive and each department sort of does their own thing and then that all feeds into presentation where with Yardi Data Connect, we can have all of the different streams of information and data be in the same system with a single source of truth. Um, so we've actually also integrated the Power BI dashboard with some of the other systems we use, meaning that all information you need is in one place. So we had a really short time to migrate from our previous IT provider to Yardi, and there were times when I thought, are we really gonna be able to pull this off? And the Yardi team was just fantastic. The collaboration between the Argyle and Yardi teams, sometimes I couldn't even tell who works for Yardi and who works for Argyle. The guys are super professional. Our teams thought that they were really friendly, really customer focused, and we completed our migration on time and with limited issues. So the IT migration was obviously, I think quite tricky because it's lots of nuts and bolts to make it happen. And for our teams, the end product is do they like it or do they find it easy? And the answers are resounding, yes, so much simpler than before. Being in one system obviously makes it really easy for them because they only have to add a member once rather than twice, and they're familiar with the Yardi interface and the Yardi software. So to bring the IT management into that was absolutely a no brainer for us. Often people don't like change, so when we are looking at any technology, you really have to find that thing that people can hold onto and that talks to them and gets them sold on a product. And what I think Yardi does really well is it does have the benefits of not only providing lots of automation as standard in the system, but I love talking to my account manager. I give them some of my ideas, let them know what type of things I think would work really well for our guy. And often I um, get told that it's gone onto the roadmap and six to nine months later, I have a feature that works beautifully for the business that we all wanted and that really resonates with our team because it's something that makes their lives so much easier. It's a very exciting time for our girl. We're currently working on two um sites. One is a refurbishment and one is a brand new acquisition that's opening in February, 2027. This has given us the opportunity to really take a step back and have a look at all of our technology and our systems. We've really looked at seeing what the office of the future looks like. We're designing these buildings with a modern office worker in mind, so we want everything to work seamlessly, and that means great hardware, good software, and looking at AI to really make the customer experience really good. I'm excited to say we'll be launching our keyless access via the Argyle Yardi app later in the year, meaning your access card will be in your wallet and give you access to your office as well as your meeting room spaces.