Sheila Nelson, Business Planning Manager for Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) Property, speaks to Real Return about her organisation’s use of the IPD Occupiers Online Benchmarking Tool. 

Sheila is responsible for business planning and performance reporting within Property, working across the department to provide management information and key performance indicators (KPIs).

“Both Lloyds TSB and HBOS are long-standing clients of IPD Occupiers benchmarking services,” she explains.  “Personally I have been working with IPD benchmarking outputs for around five years, during which time there has been a continuing progression in the service from IPD and also in the way we use the outputs.”

“I have been using the Online Benchmarking Tool for three months now,” she continues.  “It represents an additional facility for interrogating the IPD data on our estate and gives us more flexibility to look at the data in different and new ways.  We have been making considerable use of the tool since it was first demonstrated to us by our IPD account manager when it was launched.”

“The tool represents an incremental improvement in the IPD service,” says Sheila.  “At first we just used to get the plain vanilla benchmarking report, but for the past three years  we have received on-site presentations, which have been very helpful, but still didn’t provide as much flexibility for asking new questions as the Online Benchmarking Tool.”

“At the moment I’m using the tool to help me prepare a presentation for the property directors at LBG, supplementing the measures from the initial IPD report and presentation. In doing this I can now drill down into areas of special interest for the estate, for example looking at specific property types in particular areas.  I have also been comparing our results with those for businesses outside the banking sector - the grouping that is used for our standard IPD benchmarking.  So now we can compare performance of our office estate with other offices outside the banking sector.”

“The presentation I am working on will show how the findings of the benchmarking process can be used to run the business more efficiently and make our property organisation ‘world class’. So it’s all about linking benchmarking with the business process, and IPD’s tool can help by providing the level of detail to develop our KPIs. This is much easier to achieve when you can interrogate the data independently and focus the KPIs.”

“Take for instance energy costs per metre,” she continues.  “Previously this was just reported by IPD across the whole estate, but now we can drill down to get this measure of costs for office buildings, data centres and branches separately. We are also using this kind of detailed analysis to measure performance on our surplus estate – property which is no longer used by the group.

“In using the Online Reporting Tool we have found the data to be very robust and accurate,” says Sheila   “The system is very intuitive and easy to use. It builds in an obvious way on the existing IPD service, and complements the standard reporting – which, incidentally, we don’t want to lose.  The screens look nice, the response times are reasonable, and the software has been reliable since it was launched.”

To find out more about the IPD Occupiers Online Reporting Tool, please contact Elspeth Williams at elspeth.williams@ipd.com, +44(0) 207 336 9244, or visit www.ipdoccupiers.com/reporting