Summit Properties uses iSave to order goods and services online. The system sends orders to vendors and routes them for approval.
In the tight apartment market of the past few years, owners and managers have often found it difficult to boost revenue by increasing rents. When you can’t get more revenue, the next best step is to cut expenditures and increase efficiency. Summit Properties in Charlotte has done just that with iSave, a Web-based purchasing program. Integrated with the company’s general ledger and accounts payable system, iSave allows property managers to electronically purchase goods and services from light bulbs to carpet replacement.
The iSave system works like this: Property managers electronically route requisitions for approval and automatically send fax and purchase orders to vendors. The managers can browse the products and services online, add items to their shopping cart, and check out when they are finished. “It allows us to centralize the purchase, which is not something that’s easy to do with a company that’s as widely dispersed as property management companies,” says Alex Burris, vice president of information technology for Summit. “It allows us to centralize our purchasing function and quickly build strategic objectives for purchasing and then implement them.”
By switching to the system, Summit was able to develop a pre-purchase approval process, strategic vendor relationships, and volume discounting; encourage increased productivity among property managers; avoid manual redundancies; and cut down on paper, faxes, and postage. Summit says iSave lives up to its name by saving the company about $1.2 million annually, which includes volume pricing, reduction in leakage, increases in productivity, and better resource allocation. “By having a centralized purchasing function, you can more easily define what your centralized purchasing objectives are and execute on that,” Burris says.
–L. Shaver
iSave
Company: Summit Properties; Purpose: To streamline the purchasing process; Introduced: 2002; Cost: $2.67 million; Annual Savings: $1.2 million