Exclusive: JLL Launches Real-Time PortfolioCommand Offering

By Nicholas Ziegler, News Editor

JLL's PortfolioCommand

The top global service firms are constantly looking for new ways to better assist their clients, and Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. now has a new weapon in its arsenal for that arms race. The firm will be publicly launching its PortfolioCommand offering, which managing director Kenneth Rudy called “the convergence of a business process” that allows his firm to “engage in conversations with clients.”

“Commercial real estate departments … need to match supply with a company’s demand,” he told Commercial Property Executive.  “And that gap is a challenge. All the inputs in a portfolio”—from total square footage to personnel headcount to capital financing—”create hundreds of outcomes that may not be optimized.”

The PortfolioCommand offering aims to tighten those gaps in real time. JLL’s new initiative aims to combine the torrents of data created in today’s market into easy-to-digest, easy-to-model dashboards that can be accessed from anywhere. Without months of delving into spreadsheets and modeling scenarios, the client can immediately see the impact of one business process on another. What would the impact of changing capital flows be on global HR? How would IT deployment affect market strategy?

“We worked with a global pharmaceutical company that has 100,000 employees in 500 global sites across 80 countries,” Rudy said. “They were looking at a 15 percent reduction in (employee) headcount as well as a redeployment of capital from contracting operations in developing countries and into emerging markets. We used this business process to rationalize their whole portfolio over multiple phases, and we’ve started reducing their real estate cost—which frees up capital that can be redeployed into the business. Normally, a project like that can take multiple years, but within just a few months we identified and began to execute on more than $200 million a year in occupancy-cost savings. While that’s going to take three years to implement, based on lease expirations and consolidations, the decision making around that was so swift that the company had the ability to enjoy the savings almost immediately.”

The PortfolioCommand suite is run by a portfolio manager with deep experience in business strategy, analytics and transaction execution. The entire process is supported by advanced technology that can be customized for each client. And rather than being a discrete strategy project, it’s a continuous optimization of the portfolio—the convergence of information from market sources and the business side—including HR and finance—as well as from the portfolio’s performance.

“We developed PortfolioCommand to engage business leaders in an informed dialogue that centers on value creation rather than just cost reduction,” said JLL managing director Elaine Melonides. “What used to take weeks now happens in real time, ensuring and measuring ROI, informing capital planning, improving team productivity and speed to market.”

One JLL client who asked not to be named due to privacy concerns was extremely pleased with the product’s results. “(During a time of major change), I was able to do within days what would have taken months under a typical scenario, thanks to engagement from the C-suite, our partnership with Jones Lang LaSalle and my seat at the table with our business partners in HR, IT, legal and other key departments,’ he said. “(Our portfolio manager) was able not just to tap into his global transaction advisory network but also people who knew our company, and provide access to extensive sets of data. Those resources and knowledge were an incredible plus.”