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Based in Dallas, Texas, Prime Income Asset Management, LLC and its affiliates manage $2.5 billion worth of commercial real estate for public and private real estate entities including American Realty Investors, Inc. (NYSE: ARL) and Transcontinental Realty Investors, Inc. (NYSE: TCI). Prime's companies own diverse portfolios with a mix of income-producing properties and significant land holdings across the U.S. In addition, one of their companies owns a hotel in Poland and a Prime affiliate is majority owner and advisor to one of the first publicly traded real estate investment trusts in the Republic of Korea.
Prime maintains a philosophy to identify and acquire under-valued or under-performing assets that meet its investors' requirements. Post-acquisition, Prime combines property enhancements, improved services, and proven asset management techniques to maximize the value of their investments. Prime employs about 100 professionals among whom senior executive industry experience averages over 25 years.
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Prime experienced serious difficulty converting data from multiple sources into their financial system. In fact, the process was cumbersome, presented excessive time delays, and opportunities for potential data error. In addition, the annual cost to maintain the system was quite high due to its AS/400 platform and legacy Lawson ERP software.
Individual properties, managed or owned by Prime, must submit monthly financial transaction data to the headquarters location. Information enters the system from a variety of formats and in a high volume. Hundreds of Prime properties contribute monthly financial files for aggregation at regional levels. Those records are then sent for consolidation at the corporate location where journal entries are created. Under the old accounting system, conversion of incoming data into a common meta-format for manual input into Lawson was a labored process. "Files required shepherding to monitor for potential errors," noted Prime's Director of IT, Jim Hunt.
The need to move from Lawson into a more agile and scalable accounting system also presented a second challenge: migrating 13 years' worth of transactional data comprised of almost 14 million records without risking loss of any financial history.
Prime sought an alternative to Lawson that would bring power, integration, and agility to their complex business processes while maintaining their full financial transaction history since 1993. Much of the incoming data required manual manipulation to bring some consistency to otherwise dissimilar reports. Therefore, Prime also wanted to automate the manual input process by incorporating Microsoft's eConnect.
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Aztec conducted several thorough interviews with Prime personnel in order to best detect problem areas and propose effective solutions for the Tier 1 ERP (Lawson) to Tier 2 (Microsoft Dynamics™ GP) conversion. As a result, Aztec engineered a Microsoft Dynamics™ GP solution utilizing eConnect that would address Prime's goals of flexibility, lower total cost of ownership, a Microsoft-enabled solution, and transaction transparency enterprise-wide. Aztec joined efforts with Microsoft to extract, map, and populate the large volume of records from Lawson to Dynamics™ GP utilizing Visual Studio, MS–SQL server with complex SQL scripting, and eConnect.
Prime sought to enhance the eConnect upload interface built for Dynamics™GP, so that multiple parties of each operating location could upload their company's respective transaction files. As outlying Prime properties' files enter the directory, the web service scrubs, remaps accounts (from the property account to the Prime account), transforms the files into the XML format required by eConnect, and pushes the files through eConnect into Dynamics™GP. This process creates an unposted General Ledger batch in Dynamics™GP for Prime's accounting personnel to approve and post. Further, by incorporating Visual Studio, properties can submit their financials to Prime corporate without first having to manually manipulate their data. Aztec developed standardized templates that Prime's outlying properties could use for data submission. This eliminated problems of inconsistency found in prior submission procedures.
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The Aztec/Microsoft solution accomplished Prime's key objective: the ability to quickly and easily access their financial data. With their previous system, this process meant data was extremely hard to manipulate. "Extracting data was tortuously difficult and really required IT intervention," said Mr. Hunt. "Now, users — accounting personnel — are enabled to obtain reports with greater ease; accessibility is no longer an issue." With Dynamics™GP as part of a single Microsoft platform solution, Prime's management can rely on their data with full confidence and make better strategic business decisions — ultimately leading to a more successful company. Mr. Hunt commented, "It's nice to have an accounting system in place that is going to actually help us grow." Prime estimates that they have achieved an ROI on their total next-generation solution in under a single year.
Subsequently, the change to Dynamics™GP enabled Prime to reduce their annual IT expenses, maintain their full financial history, and allows their accounting department to analyze historical trends used daily for business visibility and forecasting. With Dynamics™GP, system updates are far less time-consuming than previously. "Before, it was a major planning effort including reviewing lines of code. Now, updates are almost a non-issue," explained Mr. Hunt. Benefits of the migration to Dynamics™GP also flowed to Prime's outlying properties which no longer have to expend time manipulating data before sending it to corporate. Finally, Prime ensures Sarbanes-Oxley compliance with Dynamics™GP.
Prime will next implement Aztec's Tablature solution. Tablature was specifically designed to complement existing business processes with highly-integrated memorialization of documents and files. It integrates smoothly with Microsoft Dynamics™ products.
Prime's future plans also include implementation of SharePoint and Business Portal with Dynamics™GP to create collaboration workspaces. They also desire to use SharePoint to manage their worldwide projects. This technology would allow them to have one central location where all data is kept on each project and is still accessible securely by all authorized parties.
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"By transferring the day-to-day support of all systems to Aztec, we have elevated the performance of our systems, which translated into greater performance of the entire staff."
— Kevin Leonard, Executive Vice President, StraightSource, Inc.
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