Contact us Customer log-in
site|folio blog
It’s been a couple of months since my last post. My only excuse is an easy one. Our customers have been keeping us busy. We’ve released two builds since I’ve last posted. 

The first of the two, Vanadium released in March, enables owner’s representatives to formally and electronically request a proposal (Proposal Request) from business partners within our new contract management suite. It creates a tighter integration between custom reports and schedules allowing users to click dates in custom reports and present those dates to the user, highlighted for their editing. It added 25 custom currency fields to our growing list of custom fields available for locations and projects. We created a simpler way to enter all of this data during project set-up. We made sure users using IE9 could drag and drop files between browsers and folders. Oh – and did I mention we spent a lot of time making sure our solution was cross-browser compatible?
  • Proposal Requests.
  • Reports focus to dates
  • 25 custom currency fields to location and project classification.
  • Simplify project set-up
  • Support IE9 Document Drag and Drop
  • Improve cross browser compatibility
  • Various fixes
Our second build of the quarter, Chromium released in early April made it easier for users to downgrade a version of a commitment (or approved) budget. For example, if an approved commitment budget exists yet needs to be modified the previous version of that budget is auto-downgraded to a custom budget version after the user makes changes and selects (save as). In short you’ll easily know what it used to be and who changed it.


 
Peet’s Coffee & tea selects site|folio based on previous experience in other lives. Welcome! It’s good to be working with you guys again!

Categories: site|folio News

 
Sephora turns to site|folio for a no-frills best in class solution. Welcome! It’s going to be a great partnership.

Categories: site|folio News

 

It’s here, our January 2013 release. Internally we call it Titanium.

Now it's even simpler. Enjoy dragging and dropping your files and photos. Managing your budgets end to end. Comparing to actuals while accounting for potential commitments. We've made something complicated and tedious - simple and easy. Take a look!

Drag & Drop Documents

That’s right- you can now drag and drop files right into the browser – AND – across browser windows.

http://youtu.be/5ykYub-Orzg

  • Drag single or multiple files from desktop into a folder.
  • Automatically match similar document verisons.
  • Drag new versions from the desktop onto existing files.
  • Drag a file from the browser to the desktop.
  • Unzip existing Zip into folder.
  • Drag files and folders from browser window to browser window.

Drag & Drop Photos

We didn’t stop with files. Drag and drop photos into photo libraries from your desktop.

  • Drag a set of photos from the desktop into the browser to create a new photo library.
  • Drag single or multiple photos from desktop into a photo library.
  • Auto Formatting and web compression.
  • Select all when executing photo copy/move

Contract Management

We’ve made it easier to manage all of your contracts in one place and fully integrated them into budgets.

  • All contract types (such as contractor, vendor or departmental) are now displayed on a single page.
  • Track actuals across all your areas of responsibility and compare potential changes to budget.
  • Align contracts with third party purchasing systems allowing site|folio to track the detail.
  • Natively align line items within contracts to external third party systems.
  • Copy contract line item values from a budget version.
  • Copy and merge any contracts to a budget version. 
  • Contracts support custom currency fields.

Capital Budgeting (3.0)

Manage the capital budgeting process end to end. Budgeting 3.0 makes a complicated process even simpler.

  • General
    • Improved usability and simplified navigation.
    • Quickly view all budget versions, stages, notes and values.
    • Quickly compare any budget version by stage or chronologically.
    • Unique note for each budget version and budget line item.
    • Track values at any level of the hierarchy within budget work break down structure.
    • Real-time translation of budget data for stakeholders into familiar groupings or sorts.
    • Export any view to excel.
  • Create a Baseline
    • Create a baseline budget based on templates or similar scope projects.
    • Leverage existing location and project attributes to locate similar scopes.
    • Copy, adjust and justify baseline budget.
  • Create Budget Versions
    • Create several budget models reflecting options.
    • Manage all versions from conception, through any number of stages, ultimately to commitment.
    • Facilitate multiple stakeholder input at each stage.
    • Facilitate real-time budget translation for all stakeholders. 
    • Generate custom formatted proformas for Real Estate Committees.
  • Commitment Budget
    • Approve a commitment budget.
    • Track any revisions or amendments to the commitment budget.
  • Budget to Actuals
    • Compare budget to actuals (contracts)
    • Review impact of actual ‘potential changes’ to budget.
    • Review how each budget line item is impacted by relevant contracts (actuals)
  • Reconciliation & Publish
    • Copy actuals to budget for reconciliation.
    • Manage multiple reconciliation versions until costs are allocated appropriately.
    • Publish final budget to centralized  budget database for use in creating future project baselines.
  • Copy and Modeling
    • Copy any budget value to a contract
    • Copy and merge any number of contracts to a budget version.
  • Other
    • Clear all Values
    • Hide Zero Values

Automated Email Reports

Your favorite reports straight to your inbox! 

  • Schedule delivery of reports to user.
  • Designate report type and delivery schedule.
  • Abstract email recipient to users designated in the project directory.


 

 

“Thank you, this really helps to just streamline the process for consistency purposes.  I’m really LOVING how this is coming together, btw!   Adding in details for each of these shops now is really incredible.  I’m pretty excited about bringing into the mix all the other departments that touch these shop openings, allowing all the data & documentation to flow through one central place.  Really AMAZING!!!!”

Director of Real Estate - International Cosmetics Retailer - December 2012



 

Once you have it you’ll not be able to live without it.

We’ve continued to innovate the budgeting process from conception through completion. We’ve designed a solution that can take into account each stakeholders requirements, greatly reducing the internal friction inherent in developing, approving, executing and publishing a budget. Imagine being able to simply perform early prediction of project costs accounting for volatile parameters and a narrow contingency.

This next iteration of our budgeting solution is built on our experience with our clients who attempt to increase the overall accuracy earlier in the process with less effort. It’s something I believe all companies with repeatable capital programs should be striving to accomplish. Imagine a dynamic and easily managed budgeting solution that provides a vehicle to narrow variables and manage by exception. A pool of similar scopes, templates and cost factors are accessed and developed into an initial budget. Subsequent variations are quickly developed, modeled and compared. While having visibility into real time capital spend projections, proformas, and actuals.

Unfortunately when capital program costs come under scrutiny, the most common knee jerk reaction is to force business partners to provide an insanely low level of detail at the worst point in the process, the middle or the end. There’s not much room to influence cost at this stage of the process. Staff should instead focus on executing a solid business case and instead find themselves debating wing nuts. I’d say any company that calls looking to extract this level of detail from their partners at this point in the process has a high probability of failing.

The first week of January 2013 we will be releasing the third version of our budgeting platform. We’ve taken the highly collaborative and complex aspects of budgeting and made them even simpler. Now it’s even easier to increase the accuracy earlier in the process and create efficiencies across all stakeholders. We’ve developed something you didn’t know was possible. Call us to learn more.

Have a great holiday.


Tags:

 

Included in our next release is the ability to

  1. drag and drop multiple files directly from the desktop to the browser.
  2. auto-match uploaded files with similar names as new versions of existing files.
  3. drag and drop new versions of files from the desktop to the browser.
  4. drag and drop files from the browser to the desktop.
  5. drag and drop folders or files from one browser to another.
In our continued effort to design a frictionless experience for our users this update will enable users to simply drag files where they need them and easily copy standards held in site|folio to newly created locations or projects. It's simple. You'll get it instantly. It'll save your real estate development team hours every week.



Tags:
Categories:

 

 

The retail, restaurant, banking and hospitality industries are adapting to changes to the economic climate and customers’ buying habits. Bigger retailers are doing smaller rollouts and smaller retailers are doing more rollouts.  It’s becoming a mixed bag of ground-up, inline, pop-up stores, stores within stores, restaurants inside restaurants - at this point everything’s on the table. One thing is clear. One size won’t fit all.

Our customers are implementing more than one strategy. We’ve seen them enter into different store formats (Stand Alone, Strip Center, Street, Mall and Kiosk), manage many different project types (New, Addition, Major Remodel, Minor Remodel, Refurbish, Tenant Improvement, Reset, Maintenance and Asset Management) with different development deal types (Traditional, Self, Build to Suit and Reverse Build to Suit).

These characteristics alone create 180 different combinations of capital real estate development strategies. Our current and future customers require us to provide a solution that can make them effective across any combination, at any time, at any scale.

One size can fit all, as long as the solution can be quickly adapted and tailored.

We service customers with 3 or 5,000 users.

One of our favorite customers manages the rollout and leasing of a highly successful custom soap and bath bomb chain found in most upscale malls. She has successfully accomplished this for the past three years with only three site|folio users.  They collaborate and generate all shared executive reporting directly from site|folio. She was clear in our first meeting that she wanted a better way, at least for herself. She was tired of multiple excel documents and decentralized processes. During those three years, even though she only had three users, she had our full attention. The President of the company liked how her team could effectively manage their projects and provide real-time reporting at a moment’s notice across the entire portfolio. At his request they are expanding use of site|folio from three users to fifty users.

We service customers with projects that range from 4 days to 180+ days.

Another customer manages thousands of users across fifteen unique grocery brands. This company builds stores that are either stand-alone buildings or part of a larger strip mall. site|folio acts as the thread, tying together disparate scopes of work, brands and geographies. Projects range from four days to 180+ days. They are able to centralize the management of their differing store types, project types and deal types concurrently in the same solution.

For example they decided to roll out a four day bathroom remodel alongside an eight week food service remodel. They needed minimal overhead – implementation needed to be small, fast and effective. We partnered to determine the minimum set of features that would provide adequate reporting, support and collaboration. It didn’t make sense to include many of the features required on typical 180 day projects. Similarly, it didn’t make sense to include deeper levels of functionality on the features they did choose.  It did make sense to centralize and template the effort. In the end we released a simplified schedule, a four line item budget, document collaboration and photos. Now they can still operate centrally, move effectively and focus on the important parts of executing the rollout.

Leverage business partners.

It’s why you hired them. Successful clients (regardless of scale) define clear expectations for their business partners. We work closely with our customers to define how to best leverage the efforts of their business partners. Owners that provide solutions that standardize communication inherently reduce friction on the flow of information. It doesn’t matter if a typical project takes 4 days or 180 days, getting your team out of excel and email will help keep everything on track. In the long term your business partners will appreciate a centralized and fully accountable method of communication.

Tailored and Experienced.

The point of this post is to illustrate how site|folio can be effective for any capital real estate program regardless of store format, project type or deal type. Our team works closely with capital real estate programs of all shapes and sizes. site|folio was designed from the ground up to elegantly handle these variations. If you consider yourself small and fast, big and slow or somewhere in the middle our solution will align to meet your needs.

One size can fit, because site|folio is easily adapted and tailored to your needs.



 

Cristy Rousey-Clements's (a founder and our head of client services) sister is at it again. Seems to run in the family.  Looks like getting to point and executing with precision runs in the family. 

 

Why go 5 - 5 minute rounds when you can get it done in under 60 seconds? Recap of the match starts at 18 seconds in.

 


Categories: site|folio News

 

In just two short months from our last release our August 2012 release went live to all of our customers this weekend. This release focused again on user feedback and enhancing different areas of the solution. Nothing too fancy, mainly minor improvements to make our customers even more efficient.

Let's continue to make things simpler.

Miscellaneous Enhancement:

  1. Contract Administration: improved numerical sorting of Change Order, Change Order Proposal, and Payment Application lists (i.e., 01, 10, 20)
  2. My Dashboard now available as a member’s log in homepage

Photo Libraries Enhancement:

  1. Ability to subscribe to receive email notifications for photo slideshow activity (i.e., slideshow created, photo added, photo moved, etc.)
  2. Capability to move or copy photographs between photo libraries and projects

Email Notifications Enhancement:

  1. Standardization of email notification pages across the application
  2. Standardization of notification subject lines across the application

Ad-Hoc Reporting Enhancement:

  1. Ability to define schedule report criteria relative to today’s date. (i.e., where Grand Opening: Projected is less than 30 days from today)



 
© 2004 - 2010 site|folio. All rights reserved. Various trademarks held by their respective owners.
site|folio, 1037 NE 65th Street, Suite 229 Seattle, WA 98115, United States
General inquiries: Sales: 206.462.4200 Ext. 2 | Customer Support: 206.462.4200 Ext. 1