Enhancing Operational Efficiency in Real Estate By Abhrasnata Das

Enhancing Operational Efficiency in Real Estate

Abhrasnata Das | Tuesday, 19 April 2022, 13:17 IST

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Pankaj Pandit, CIO, Oberoi Realty in an interaction with Sudhakar Singh, Editor, CIOTechOutlook, shares his insights on how the real estate industry is adopting novel technologies for better operability.

How do you see the current level of IT maturity of the real estate companies in India?

Over the last 10 years, the real estate sector of India has gained much maturity in terms of business operations. With the introduction of the Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA) in 2016, new compliances and regulations have been introduced, and with it the sector has become more transparent and organized. Today, global investors are developing their interest in the Indian market. For example - American alternative investment management company, Blackstone is planning to invest a whopping amount of USD 20 billion over the span of next ten years.  

The growing business maturity of the real estate sector is the key facilitator driving the technology growth of this industry. Moreover, the present management personnel of the leading real estate companies are IT savvy, and they understand the impact that technologies can bring about for their organizations. Today, almost all the big real estate companies have already adopted the technologies like AI, ML, etc. In other words, the real estate sector is catching up very fast with the novel technologies and within the next three years, it will be on par with the other sectors like manufacturing, organized engineering and construction.   

How is Oberoi Realty implementing the novel technologies?  

On the technical front, we're continuing to concentrate on two areas. Firstly,  we are looking to increase the organization's operational efficiency, and secondly,  we are aiming at providing an unrivalled customer experience. To enhance operational efficiency, Oberoi Realty has been aggressively investing  in  emerging technologies like - BIM.  While, on the other hand, the firm is also bringing in things like AR  based CRM platforms to deliver an unmatched experience to our customers.

How is the real estate sector leveraging technologies to collaborate with different stakeholders?

The real estate industry has deployed multiple technologies to collaborate with different stakeholders like – contractors and designers in a virtual environment. Not to mention, in a sensitive industry like real estate it is also imperative to take note on the security parameters when sharing confidential information like designs and legal papers. At Oberoi Realty, we use technologies like Autodesk and  other tools to collaborate properly with an architect, and to ensure that the design process is smooth and fast.

Furthermore, most of the construction that we do is outsourced to big contractors like L&T. Here, the key challenge lies in effectively collaborating with our contractors to ensure the quality parameters. In such situations as well, the mobile enabled Autodesk tools give us a leading edge. For example, let’s consider the case when a two step checklist has to be executed to ensure quality. First step is done by the contractor, and the second step is done by our quality team. The state-of-art tools like Autodesk gives us a fruitful result, when performing critical tasks like quality control at different levels.

When it comes to cyber security, the threat landscape is expanding. How should real estate companies achieve a safe security posture?

Today, there are multiple points from where a cyber attack can take place. Hence, it is imperative for an entity to opt for a layered security approach.

The very basic step for the same would be to use cloud based firewalls. Secondly, it is important to have good email security as a second line of defense wherein it analyzes all the emails and scrubs out the malicious attachments to deliver a clean email to the employee.  The most common vehicle of delivering a malicious payload, be it a ransomware or malware, is phishing email.

Third, a company must use very powerful endpoint security. Moreover, it is crucial that an endpoint security not only detects the attack, but also remediates it. Generally, in an endpoint attack, malware can also spread from one PC to another and ultimately to the server before it even actually starts an attack. So, there is a huge potential of the business getting compromised because of this. Hence, it is important to immediately contain it.

Lastly, one must also invest in a very powerful DLP for optimum data protection. As employees have full access to the company data, the confidential data becomes highly vulnerable to data leakage. So, a firm has to have really powerful tools to take care that the data is protected.

In terms of technology, how do you see the real estate market evolving in the near future? How is Oberoi Realty gearing up for strengthening its technology capabilities?

Looking at the future, it seems that people will invest a lot in Data Analytics, AI, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Blockchain.

At Oberoi Realty, we are approaching in the same direction. The firm is already investing  in key areas like security, data and more. Furthermore, we are looking to digitize our entire process to the maximum extent. We are also working to implement 6D BIM, wherein the operation also gets handled through the model. In the coming days, the focus will massively shift towards sustainability, smart cities, IoT, smart homes, etc. 

 

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