What's in it for you
If your centre managers spend the first week of every month chasing turnover figures, the next chasing insurance certificates, and the rest answering "where is my invoice", this is what happens when an agent does the chasing and the answering. You will see what it collects from tenants, what it hands them back, how it connects to the ERP and respects the regulation of each territory, and what it takes to run one agent across a multi-country portfolio in several languages.
The Client
A shopping-centre group operating across several countries, with dozens of centres, thousands of tenants from global chains to single-store owners, SAP as the enterprise system, and a centre-management team in each territory working under its own language and its own regulation.
The Challenge
The relationship with a tenant is mostly paperwork, and the paperwork never stops.
- Every month, every tenant owes the centre a turnover figure; every year, an annual one. Collecting them meant calls, reminders and spreadsheets, centre by centre
- Insurance documents, fire approvals and the other certificates a lease requires expire on their own schedule, and tracking them was a manual job nobody wanted
- Tenants, in turn, needed things from head office, invoices most of all, and got them by asking whoever they knew and waiting
- Centre managers were the switchboard for all of it, in both directions, and their real work waited
- Each territory ran the process its own way, in its own language, under its own rules, so nothing scaled across the group
What We Are Building
At TippingPoint, we built an agent that talks to the tenants so the centre managers do not have to, and we are rolling it out territory by territory.
- Mapped the tenant-facing processes in the first territory. Every recurring item a tenant owes the centre and every item the centre owes the tenant, who handles it, which system it lives in, and where it stalls.
- Gave the collection a voice. The agent asks each tenant for what is due, monthly and yearly turnover, insurance documents, fire approvals, and follows up until it arrives. It reads what comes back, checks it, and files it where the group's systems expect it.
- Made it serve the tenant too. Invoices and the other things tenants need from head office are requested in the same conversation and delivered from the source, without a person in the middle.
- Connected it to SAP. Figures and documents land in the enterprise system; the agent works from the same tenant, unit and lease records the group already runs on.
- Built it for many territories at once. Multi-language by design, with the regulation of each territory handled as configuration, so the agent built for the first country runs in the next without being rebuilt.
The Impact
- Turnover figures, certificates and approvals collected by the agent instead of chased by people
- Tenants getting invoices and answers from head office in the conversation, at any hour, in their own language
- Centre managers handling exceptions and the tenant mix, not the paperwork
- One agent, one process, across every territory the group operates in, and the first of several products the group is now building on the same foundation
Outcome: the monthly chase stops being the centre manager's job and becomes something that simply happens.