Mills speeds lease process
The Mills Corporation, a company that develops large retail and entertainment centers, will use workflow software to speed its contract lease approval process.
The solution involves Ceyoniq Application Portal and Process Manager software. The goal of the installation is to reduce Mills’ average leasing contract negotiation and approval time to under 45 days, thereby accelerating the opening of new tenant stores.
The Mills Corporation owns and operates 1,217 Mills centers in 10 states, Canada and Spain. The centers contain many retail stores, as well as entertainment and recreation facilities such as a large skate park at the Potomac Mills in Maryland. Because of the large number of tenants, each center requires extensive lease negotiations and as many as 200 contracts in various stages of negotiation and approval.
“Our tenant leases are very large and complex multi-year contracts with dozens of interrelated terms and conditions that undergo several levels of review and approval throughout our highly distributed organization,” explains Jonathan Levi, VP of information technology and telecommunications with Mills. “By implementing [this system] we can Web-enable and make the lease negotiation process collaborative, while maintaining security and managing it according to our customized business rules.
Mills’ initial plan calls for software to automate and expedite the contract process. Other workflow improvements, such as an enterprise information portal, will be implemented in the future.
In the first phase of the project, which will create a secure collaborative solution for the lease negotiation process, 125 users will be involved. Eventually 650 employees will have access to the Process Manager and Application Portal.
The EIP phase, which has not been scheduled yet, will open the portal to all Mills users and migrate its corporate intranet onto the platform.
According to Ceyoniq, the Application Portal is a personalized enterprise solution that allows Web-based, single-point access and interaction with all of a company’s mission-critical documents and document-related technologies. Process Manager, a rules-based process automation system, manages complex processes in both client-server and Web environments.