by Richard Daley, Director of Information Management at Tejon Ranch
Mobile business applications on phones and other hand-held devices are taking hold in the business today, and Tejon Ranch is a great example of how that technology is making a big difference.
Our name is a bit deceiving. We’re more of a city than a “ranch.”
We have nearly 270,000 acres, which makes us the largest continuous expanse of private land in California. With 422 square miles, we’re almost as large as Los Angeles and about 40 percent the size of Rhode Island. Our current projects include Tejon Industrial Complex, a 1,450-acre commercial/industrial park; Tejon Mountain Village, a resort community of 26,400 acres; and Centennial, a 12,000-acre planned city with 23,000 housing units.
With so much land to traverse, our employees needed a mobile solution when they’re off-site to access key information and collaborate across the organization Our employees now use their mobile application on iPads to take advantage of key content and case management capabilities remotely for all parts of our business including contracts management, insurance verification, and bond management.
Tejon Ranch has a mobile application that enables iPad users to take advantage of key content and case management capabilities remotely to provide real time access key records and information, drive dynamic collaboration and agile decision making across the organization. This covers areas such as contracts management and insurance verification across 5,000 consultants and managing access to bonds for general use improvements and building projects.
Now that we’re “mobile,” we’re doing three times as much with our systems now as we did previously, but we’ve only added two staff members to the IT team. We predict a three-year ROI of $4 million using IBM, but as for the value in terms of transforming the way we do business, that’s beyond calculation.
It wasn’t too long ago that we had only a manual, paper-based records management system to manage our growth. Back then our businesses were operating as separate, siloed entities. Employees used paper for their work processes and stored this information in boxes, folders and notebooks.
Using IBM software, we can now maneuver contracts through the office more easily to make sure insurance certificates are updated and pro-actively notify our workers and consultants when their insurance needs to be updated or reissued. Dynamic tasks can be set to ensure insurance verification is obtained or appropriate action is taken. And all this information is accessible via iPads.
As a public company, Tejon also has to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA and is subject to audits by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The iPad application allows knowledge workers to access critical content, make decisions and collaborate in real time while ensuring that compliance objectives are met by managing content as records, regardless of format.
Our long-term goal is to build our IBM solution out to the 5,000 remote consultants and vendors we work with on a daily basis, providing a way for them to directly contribute content to the Tejon solution and collaborate with the Tejon team.
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