Enhanced
data trust for decision-making
40+
seamless MDM integrations
Weekly
acquisition data onboarded
As real estate services giant Emeria pursued aggressive regional growth, adding to its portfolio of popular brands like Foncia, it needed to modernize its approach to data management. With Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform, Emeria now uses MDM SaaS, data integration and data quality services to build a central data foundation that new and existing business units can trust.
“We selected Informatica as part of a best-in-breed approach. We were impressed by its product vision and possibilities, especially around AI and automation for our long-term roadmap.”
A real estate giant faces data growing pains
Emeria stands as a titan in the European real estate services market, boasting an impressive footprint across eight countries including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Benelux and Switzerland. With over 17,000 employees spread across more than 700 branches, the company positions itself as a one-stop shop for residential and commercial property needs, from lease management and property administration to brokerage and ancillary services. Headquartered in Paris, France, Emeria operates many well-known brands such as Foncia in France (condominium management) and Chestertons in the UK (lettings and estate agency).
This robust portfolio has fuelled the company's recent growth, but it also presents a growing data management challenge. Emeria must manage referral data across hundreds of companies and thousands of agencies and stores. Benoit Abadie, Enterprise Architecture and Services Director at Emeria, explains: “As Emeria expanded into new markets, use of our referral system kept growing, and we needed to think differently about how it was built and its ability to synchronize with other systems.”
The company's rapid pace of growth, including 41 external acquisitions and three organic expansions in 2023 alone, further strained the legacy data infrastructure. Mathieu Plobner, Enterprise Architect at Emeria, highlights the scale of this challenge: "Last year, we had an external growth event almost every week, which meant a whole new perimeter of data and processes that had to be integrated into our systems.”
This external challenge was compounded by internal fragmentation. Many departments and subsidiaries had their own Excel files or data, which weren’t centralized or trusted across teams. Synchronization between various systems was often manual and prone to errors, exacerbating data quality issues and becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
While the company had a legacy master data management (MDM) solution in place, there were still occasional data quality issues, slowing down decision-making and operational efficiency. Its increasingly obsolete capabilities were also incompatible with a cloud-first data footprint. As Emeria continued to expand, the company recognized that its continued growth trajectory called for a transformation of its data management practices.
“As Emeria expanded into new markets, use of our referral system kept growing, and we needed to think differently about how it was built and its ability to synchronize with other systems.”
Building a cloud-ready culture of excellence
To address these challenges, Emeria embarked on an ambitious project to build a new center of data excellence. The goal was to manage and master data centrally in a hub-and-spoke structure, allowing teams secure access to relevant data while feeding downstream applications for thousands of potential users across IT, support and business teams.
Emeria also had a growing focus on the cloud as part of its ongoing digital transformation efforts. The company was retiring its data centers in France and migrating workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, its legacy MDM vendor didn’t offer the control, ease of maintenance or cloud- and AI-readiness the business needed to sustain its growth.
The data leadership team saw an opportunity to make a change and they decided to partner with Informatica to implement the Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). “We selected Informatica as part of a best-in-breed approach,” says Benoit Abadie. “We were impressed by its product vision and possibilities, especially around AI and automation for our long-term roadmap.”
The new data platform included Informatica MDM 360 SaaS, an AI-powered, cloud-native solution for unifying enterprise data across multiple data domains. Other IDMC services include Cloud Data Integration (CDI) for seamless batch synchronization to Snowflake data lakes, and Cloud Application Integration (CAI) for connecting data to apps like Workday and Okta, as well as real-time, event-based integrations with Emeria’s in-house ERP. Additionally, Cloud Data Quality (CDQ) replaced manual maintenance work with automated rule creation and enforcement.
Aligning with Emeria's cloud-first strategy, the new Informatica solution was implemented on Amazon Web Services (AWS), accelerated by IDMC’s pre-built cloud connectors. This approach not only provided the scalability and flexibility to support Emeria's growth but also facilitates future digital use cases for customers, from universal profiles to online billing.
Early benefits of a best-in-class MDM
Emeria quickly began seeing significant benefits from its IDMC investment. The team first migrated and mastered its legal and enterprise resource planning (ERP) domains, with plans to expand to customer, building and equipment. Informatica data processing automations required far less technical resources to maintain and iterate, freeing up engineers and architects to focus on high-value activities such as data stewardship and quality improvement rather than simply keeping the system running.
The team has already built over 40 automated synchronizations for MDM consumers. The new single point of truth restores trust, which sparks an upward spiral – new business use cases and needs lead to more users and automations, and thus better data quality. As Mathieu Plobner notes, "We’ve already seen better [MDM] adoption with Informatica. Since there is trust, the application has more users, and they use it better."
Another major improvement has been the ability to rapidly publish custom screens for data quality rules and daily governance checks. This streamlined workflow saves the team significant time and headaches, and results in more timely documentation for customers, populated with fully vetted information from the right agency system. Mathieu Plobner continues: “Before, when we wanted to add something, we had to do a small project because it was a 100% custom solution. Now, it’s easy to customize or even create brand-new screens for different clients and brands right from Informatica.”
Perhaps most importantly, the new system has improved Emeria's ability to capitalize on its rapid growth and acquisitions. The company can now ensure that new agencies and legal entities are properly integrated into their data ecosystem quickly and efficiently, and that accurate referral data is flowing between its ERP and front-office web applications.
Lessons learned and looking ahead
Building on the success of this initial MDM implementation, Emeria has ambitious plans to develop new domains for managing fees and pricing information. These would replace current systems that rely on Excel sheets and PDF files, where it’s hard to apply new global policies or audit records for errors and inconsistencies. Another project in the pipeline is the creation of a domain for e-invoicing to comply with new legal requirements in France and Europe.
Beyond these specific projects, Emeria is committed to ongoing improvement of its data governance and stewardship processes. Trusted data is critical for operational onboarding and compliance and for the company’s growing data science and research teams which are working on AI capabilities integrated with the in-house ERP.
Reflecting on the journey thus far, the Emeria team stresses the importance of educating business stakeholders about the many benefits of MDM beyond simple modernization. With its new approach, Emeria not only overcame data growing pains – it built a foundation for growth with a stronger internal data culture and a flexible infrastructure to handle any real-time streaming, cloud or AI use case.
The real estate titan is well-positioned to maintain its market leadership, integrating new entities with speed and ease while adapting quickly as market challenges arise.
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Intelligent Data Management Cloud
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