Faster and more informed decision-making thanks to SONEKA

I think it's a real win for the whole group and the employees.

Can you introduce Financière Teychené and your role?

The Groupe Financière Teychené is a family-owned group that was founded by Mr. Teychené around40 years ago. He is still the chairman and shareholder.

It is a group dedicated to managing its own assets; it is a real estate investment company.

Financière Teychené specializes in investing in and managing retail parks, or at least retail outlets on the outskirts of medium-sized and large cities.

Then there are a whole host of other activities: we have a subsidiary, particularly in student residences; we have a hotel; we have other types of assets.

But really, 80% of our business is in retail.

It's a national group, but it also has a significant presence in Belgium and has made investments in Florida in recent years.

I work in the asset management department, where we handle investments and arbitrage, but also take a global view of the assets and major trends in order to advise management on decision-making.

Why did Financière Teychené choose to implement SONEKA?

As it was a family business, it's true that we had a somewhat unusual way of operating, quite different from institutional companies.

We wanted to consolidate all the information within the group, which was scattered in various formats and across different departments. We wanted to make the information reliable and easy to read for all employees, regardless of their role, since we are an internal team.

So we have people in both technical and sales roles. We wanted everyone to be able to access information quickly and easily.

That was our initial goal. Above all, we were trying to look to the future, thinking that we needed to integrate fairly structured processes.And todo that, we need reporting that goes in that direction.

SONEKA was the perfect tool to do that. It also helps us plan from a financial perspective, with cashflows, and gives us an increasingly accurate analysis of the future of our assets and what we should do with them. That's why we chose SONEKA.

How did the integration project go?

It was quite a big project at the beginning because we have a lot of different assets.

We wanted to have a fairly accurate picture of each asset, and since some of them have been with us for a very long time, we wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to enter the details of leases and buildings and be as detailed as possible, if I may say so.

In particular, we wanted to include all the historical information we had, which was almost entirely on paper or in spreadsheets: previous tenants, the terms of purchase, what had happened, etc.

We really went into detail, so it took a long time.

Today, things are going pretty well, and we've started to set up some internal logistics.

We're a team of three working on this every day, sometimes with different analyses, so there are discussions, but they're quite in-depth.

Soit was quite a lot of work, but we're happy with the results today.

After a few months of use, what do you think is the added value of SONEKA?

SONEKA saves us a lot of time.

We've been able to organize meetings with all departments to get a more comprehensive view of an asset, which we can then present to the shareholder.

Now, with just one or two clicks, we can quickly get a picture of an asset, or even its liabilities, its current situation, and the risks we may have with a tenant or a building.

This means that decision-making is much faster, allowing us to spend more time on more assets, which is essential in today's economic climate.

So for us, it has really been a facilitating tool.

How is your day-to-day relationship with the SONEKA team?

It's a very good relationship.

We spent a lot of time with the SONEKA teams beforehand, so that they could understand how we work, our specific requirements, and the other software we use, as we had a few other tools.

Once we had worked on developing the project, we were in daily contact with theSONEKA teams: if not every day, then every three days.

They explain things to us, tell us how to proceed on certain points, and we also share our specific requirements with them, which can help them to take a more global view of SONEKA and the developments they can make.

Overall, what do you think of SONEKA?

SONEKA makes our lives easier.

Above all, it gives us perspective.

Today, we use it in a relatively basic way.

But it gives us prospects, because we can see that there are lots of tools, lots of things we didn't use before, or didn't really look at.

Now we feel that we have a lot of possibilities and very specific ways of managing our assets in the best possible way.

Above all, once again, in the current economic climate, where we need to be very close to our tenants and really monitor our assets on a daily basis.

It's a tool that helps us enormously.

What are the next SONEKA features that Financière Teychené plans to use?

Yes, it has opened up a whole range of possibilities that we had never even considered before.

So for now, we're focusing on the main things: leases, rental statements, and financing.

Today, the next step is definitely news feed management, which we hope will be participatory and will encourage exchanges between departments with less compartmentalization.

Then we'll get to work on the technical side, on multi-year plans, perhaps in more detail on marketing management, possibly on CSR, and then on information management as well, third parties, and our relationship with our internal data room.