Icade, a French real estate development, promotion, and management company, selected the Bonita Cloud platform to transform its IT architecture and set up a real agile development factory.
The group’s central IT department, responsible for providing an open-architecture tool base to the entire group, chose the extensible open source platform.
Icade designs innovative real estate products and services to meet new urban uses and lifestyles. They provide investment opportunities in tertiary and health real estate, along with promotion, to contribute to the emergence of tomorrow's smart and responsible cities. Organized around 3 major activity centers which share many applications, the group initiated an IT transformation project during the second half of 2019 to industrialize process modeling thereby gain productivity.
The need for an agile development capability
Marie Guillard, Head of Studies and Master Planning at Icade, says: “With a complex system built around numerous satellite applications and different ERP management solutions, it became essential for our teams to be able to automate and accelerate our cross-application processes. Our objective is to improve the understanding, acceptance and dissemination of internal procedures at the group level."
Other prerequisites in the specifications included a large and scalable functional scope capable of addressing Icade’s various business issues, an agile development capacity to test the solution, and the ability to gradually increase secure and open development on third party systems.
Specifications were provided at the end of February 2019 to five providers. Bonitasoft was quickly chosen following a demonstration using a first use case for property with four processes: automation of site engagement which requires a validation workflow at different levels; supplier evaluation (including compliance for the “Know Your Supplier” standards), order validation, and site closures.
First deployment with Bonita platform - and beyond
Marie Guillard explained, "Following this first deployment, our objective is to rapidly extend the solution to new business areas, in particular to our property development and to HR management. Our credo: work in stages and prioritize projects according to the value brought by automation, to eventually integrate all of our processes via Bonita and make them a solid foundation within our information system."
Note that beyond outsourcing, there are economic and technological reasons that led the real estate company to opt for Bonita Cloud: to free themselves from process deployment administration and production management while still benefiting from the same functionality and extensibility offered by the on premise version.
A small project team composed of an integrating partner (RS2i) and business collaborators has been assembled. Once trained, these employees will become ambassadors and will be responsible for promoting the solution within the group.