ICF Habitat: an internal data marketplace to better manage SNCF Group’s property assets
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Company profile
ICF Habitat is a real estate subsidiary of the SNCF Group, and has been in business for almost 100 years. It manages a portfolio of 95,000 homes, 85% of which are social housing. The company aims to provide sustainable, quality housing for all.
Sector
Services & manufacturing businesses
Location
France
Challenge: Improve internal data sharing
To enable all the company’s employees to benefit from the advantages of data, our Real Estate Department has launched an internal self service data marketplace.
"In order to give ICF Habitat employees the means to contribute to building a better world and to improve our decision-making, we have focused on our data. We have combined datasets with external information in order to maximize their usefulness. Through data we are now able to monitor our activities, strategic assets, development plans, and safety audits."
Data experience: data as an efficiency driver and management tool
Five objectives underpin the aims of ICF Habitat’s real estate division:
- To develop its real estate portfolio in a sustainable, responsible and visible manner.
- To optimize the balance between development, conservation, refurbishment and disposal of assets in its portfolio.
- To maintain assets to enhance their social and economic value.
- To anticipate events to better manage activities, achieving this by analyzing and sharing data, rather than simply collecting it.
- To have a positive impact on the environment.
We understand the importance of making the most of the Group’s data to achieve these objectives. Creating an internal data marketplace has enabled our teams to create multiple dashboards and data visualizations to support the Group’s mission.
In order to keep employees up to date with the Group’s vision and objectives, and to monitor progress towards them, we have created multiple dashboards:
The Philosophy page: This provides an at a glance view of the Real Estate Department’s overall objectives, along with the key actions required to achieve them. Employees can use this to shape their activities.
The committee monitoring page: Refurbishments, new construction, and the acquisition/disposal of assets are approved during specific committee meetings. Through a dashboard, the Group’s employees can see exactly what has been decided (for example, the number of projects under review, completion time, financial impact, etc.). Actions already completed are then detailed in a second part of the dashboard. This dashboard is interactive and can be filtered by region, municipality, or by project type. It is also possible to configure the display of the dashboard to cover a given period or date, looking either backwards or into the future.
On request, the Real Estate Department can also create follow-up dashboards very quickly. For example, the department’s annual activity report, which used to take one week to produce, can now be updated in a few clicks.
With a desire to increase both its real estate portfolio and the number of renovations of existing assets in the coming years, we require management tools that provide employees with the necessary means to achieve their objectives.
Steering the Strategic Development Plan (SDP) projects: The SDP is a tool for decision making around ICF Habitat’s development policy. It aims to support the company at a local level. Through its internal marketplace, ICF Habitat provides different dashboards, which can be filtered geographically:
- The study of development potential, which allows users to visualize where opportunities to develop the Group’s activities have been identified, shown through maps or tables.
- The action plan, which provides a view of the objectives and actions implemented by each local area.
- Thematic analysis: on past and future operations, on landowners in France, family demographics and comparative views on strategic actions.
Steering Strategic Asset Plan projects: this is a decision-making tool that covers the Group’s existing assets. It is based on several criteria (such as location and asset condition), which it uses to put forward specific actions (including conservation, resale, or renovation). This dashboard contains all the information needed to understand the Group’s strategic actions, providing a decision-making tool for employees.
The strategy can be filtered by building or housing asset, making it possible to see which actions have been chosen/signed o by the management committee, and to see the progress of related projects.
Access to data is central to effectively enabling day-to-day working. To achieve this we have developed other data services data services have been developed:
Social landlord dashboard: a real decision-making tool, this dashboard allows ICF Habitat employees to see the overall French social housing stock, across all landlords. They can filter down to specific areas and look forward to compare the current and the future state. A table view also allows access to detailed information on each building.
A map of correlations between housing development and rail networks that allows employees to analyze the situation and make better decisions.
A dashboard for suppliers to develop the attractiveness of ICF Habitat to them. This dashboard contains relevant information for partners. This is a key way of increasing competitiveness, especially around tender requests.
Culture & Governance
In order to manage activities, we have created a comprehensive data governance strategy. This aims to engage employees and create a data culture.
In practice, this means:
- Defining and applying rules to govern the processing and use of data
- Running regular checks to guarantee data quality
- Training employees to give them skills and autonomy in handling data
"We started with simple topics that helped solve real internal business issues. This really helped employees to adopt our new data centric culture. We can now see that they are more and more willing to play with data, which is a real victory for us."
Huwise: the foundation of icf habitat’s data experiences
The practice for developing data-related projects within ICF Habitat is to work with IT specialists. However, this decentralized organization did not allow for sufficient agility to create new innovative projects. Adopting Huwise was a big step forward for us, meaning we can now implement projects very quickly.
Data enrichment
ICF Habitat uses many datasets from the Huwise Data hub to enrich its data. For example, adding geographic data from the Data hub allows teams to spend less time geographically validating data. It also facilitates the creation of maps, particularly thanks to the possibility of creating map locations based on addresses.
Creating custom data visualizations
The dashboards created by ICF Habitat provide multiple views and filters to facilitate data manipulation. Their visual and graphic rendering helps make data easy to understand. These are real assets that have been quickly adopted by employees to help them in jobs.
Governance management
With Huwise, it is very easy to define governance rules to allow everyone to access and publish data. This is very important for ICF Habitat as we want to guarantee the availability of reliable and reusable data.
Results: supporting company’s strategy with data
Thanks to the deployment of Huwise within ICF Habitat, we can offer employees reference data that can be reused in several formats. The information circulates freely, without requiring data specialists. This provides multiple advantages for the company:
- Controlled and transparent management of the real estate portfolio thanks to a 360° view of all operations and in-depth analysis of the wider sector.
- Higher employee efficiency when carrying out their roles, while making it easy to launch new projects.
- More transparency in relations with external partners and stakeholders, which increases our attractiveness to partners.
- Greater confidence in the future due to the ability to project strategies over several years and identify their impacts and benefits.
"The projects carried out by ICF Habitat’s Real Estate Department on Huwise are impressive. Teams have been able to quickly gain expertise on the platform, which has allowed them to develop more and more sophisticated services. The insights revealed by the implementation of data visualizations and thematic dashboards show why it is essential to enhance the value of internal data in order to be more e cient and adaptable to manage future challenges."
About the
Samuel Tajtelbom
Real Estate Development Director , ICF Habitat
Experienced real estate leader, specialist in high-impact projects. His philosophy: developing talent and creating performance through connection and sharing.
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