LINCOLN PROPERTY COMPANY, the largest privately held property management firm in the nation, manages 250 multi-family communities. The apartment communities include those owned by investors, as well as apartments developed by Lincoln itself through its Building and Development operations in its Dallas headquarters. With an average of 300 units per community generating millions in annual revenue, effective asset management is critical.

Like many companies needing to upgrade for Y2K compatibility, Lincoln faced an important choice. They could upgrade their existing application merely to accommodate the Year 2010 date change, or look for solutions that would address the date change as well as add needed productivity, functionality and cost-savings to their operations.

Optimizing the performance of properties demands daily monitoring, not only of cash flow but also of advertising and promotions, occupancies and vacancies, rental demographics, competitive promotions, etc. Lincoln started transferring this information from their communities in 1995 using what are now legacy scripts based on PC Anywhere for DOS 4.5. Simply upgrading to Y2K compatible versions of PC Anywhere still left them with several undesirable aspects of the application. They would still experience long distance charges from the modem-to-modem connections, as well as scheduling conflicts when uploading files took longer than expected. They would also continue to deal with reliability problems while transferring the large backup files generated by Rent Roll, the property management software installed at many of Lincoln’s apartment sites.

The company envisioned a more automated way to retrieve the accounting and property management information, without placing technical demands on apartment management staff, who typically use only a few Microsoft Office applications such as Word and Excel, and virtually never install programs at the site. Lincoln wanted to automate the transmission of the properties' management reporting.

To facilitate the information flow from the properties to the home office, Lincoln chose DropChute Enterprise, a unique "workflow automation server" from Hilgraeve, Inc. When fully implemented, DropChute Enterprise will be installed at each of the 250 apartment properties, a few regional locations and a server in the company’s Dallas-based home office. DropChute Enterprise provides easy information transfer for the business managers and administrative staff at the properties, and also provides automated functions to work with Insite Portfolio and JD Edwards applications at the home office.

Every night properties send Rent-Roll information to the home office. The automation features of DropChute Enterprise help make this a completely hands-free operation. When the RentRoll backup files are complete, DropChute Enterprise's AutoDelivery Folder automatically connects to the Internet to deliver the files to the DropChute Enterprise servers in the Dallas home office.

From there, DropChute Enterprise’s Inbox Automation is able to identify the management data from the accounting data. It automatically transfers the Rent Roll backup to the data storage directory on the system, where it is imported into Insite Portfolio. DropChute Enterprise transfers the accounts payable files into another directory, which the AS/400 system retrieves and automatically uploads to the JD Edwards accounting system.

In the highly competitive world of property management, it’s important that information is delivered on time and to the right person. DropChute Enterprise features built-in "on-the-fly" encryption, compression and user authentication, ensuring that accounting and management data can’t be intercepted when transmitted through the Internet.