Power BI and Yardi Integration for a Real Estate Development Group

Client

Our client is a Texas-based commercial property owner and development firm specializing in single-tenant industrial facilities. They currently own over 9 million+ square feet of real estate across Texas and the Southeast region of the US and have been around since 1979.

CLIENT PROFILE
EMPLOYEES: 30+
INDUSTRY: Real Estate
FOUNDED: 1979

Project Scope

The main issue the client had was integrating their real estate management software, Yardi, with Power BI so they could access data in a much more manageable way. At the time, only a few people in the company were versed in creating Yardi reports. They would create those reports and send them out as an Excel file for the rest of the business to view, which wasn’t ideal.

Yardi is a robust platform that can be difficult and intimidating for users who aren’t familiar with the UI or how to navigate the system, so visualizing that data in Power BI, where little change management is required from the end users, was a big need for the company. The client tried to use the out-of-the-box starter pack of canned Power BI reports that came with Yardi, which can create base tables using generic Yardi data, but the data in Power BI was not aligning with the data in Yardi. They needed something more advanced to meet their needs.

Power BI and Yardi Integration
Power BI and Yardi Integration

Key Challenges

There were a few challenges along the way that the Smartbridge team faced.

  • Yardi does provide a data dictionary but not a glossary. This meant that there were over 5,000 pages of tables without specific names which made it difficult for the team to find exactly what they were looking for.

  • Even though Yardi has a starter pack, they do not have a true connector to easily connect to Power BI. The Smartbridge team had to learn how to create custom queries and custom data flows in order to meet the client’s objective. It’s a mult-step process that requires the right access to Yardi and Power BI.

The Smartbridge Solution

Smartbridge performed an assessment for the client where they looked at the starter pack, capabilities, and talked with Yardi themselves to assess what the capabilities were between Power BI and Yardi.

Once the team gathered the necessary information, they were able to work with a Yardi consultant to find the right tables they needed, learn and create custom data flows to bring the Yardi data to Power BI, and then test it to ensure everything that needed to be shown was showing.

Smartbridge has extensive experience in Power BI integrations

Value Delivered

The result and value the client received from Smartbridge is tailormade Power BI reports that mimic the reports available in Yardi using the Yardi data. End users and stakeholders can now quickly access the necessary information they need to make decisions in a more consumable and easily navigable format.

Keep Reading: Power BI Support for a Construction and Facilities Services Company

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