The Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) just published three new standards and is finalizing work on a fourth. Last week, it released version two of its Commercial Information Exchange (CIE) Standard. This week, it issued its Work Request and Work Order Fulfillment (WRWOF) standard and Commercial Property Information Exchange (CPIE) Standard.

OSCRE was formed to develop, synthesize and adopt e-business standards that will enable the real estate industry to function effectively and efficiently in the new economy.

"OSCRE members are concluding very significant bodies of work that are poised to produce a seismic shift in the way the real property industry does business," says Andy Fuhrman, CEO of OSCRE "We're talking about truly incredible and realistic reductions in operating costs, data exchange, improved data quality and transparency and the beginning capabilities for industry stakeholders to perform end-to-end electronic transactions."

The CPIE Standard is designed to streamline the exchange of portfolio level data, such as sites, buildings and tenant lease information from seller to buyer, saving the new owner weeks or months of effort to manually input information about a property.

The WRWOF standard will automate service requests, work order management and report generation between stakeholders with shared business processes, including occupants, service providers, suppliers and owners. The standard is applicable for corporate, commercial, industrial and multi-family sectors of real estate.

"The benefit of this standard is to reduce the cost and time it takes to develop and support the request and fulfillment process, allowing direct interoperability between different partners across different user platforms and reduce the time to migrate data and increase reliability," says John Serri, senior solutions architect of Manhattan Software and chair of OSCRE's Facilities Management Workgroup.

Current methods for processing service requests and work orders require custom systems integration between various stakeholders and their software applications, Fuhrman said. "Processes must be reengineered and re-deployed each time new service providers become part of the team. The ability to replace service providers and software applications has been extremely difficult since they typically provide their own software applications with a proprietary method of structuring their data," he said. The problem, he explains, is multi-faceted:

• Facility operations have become complex with many cooperating organizations.
• Organizations need to choose and operate many best in class applications - and easily add/change vendors.
• Software developers need to support many companies and interoperate with many other applications.
• Custom interfaces for all the permutations are slow and expensive.

Because OSCRE standards eliminate the need for manual data re-entry and a great deal of data scrubbing, proponents say information exchanges occur near instantaneously with better quality at lower costs, allowing businesses to assign their labor force to other critical tasks.

According to the American Institute of Architects, "In the short term, data exchange partners will benefit from decreased costs associated with less data entry, simpler data management and improved data quality. The financial benefits of this process will initially be a reduction in soft costs. Hard cost savings may occur after the data exchange process is vetted with both the data originator and data receiver, allowing both parties to cut labor costs associated with data management."

But the AIA adds that the business value of the OSCRE standard process cannot be entirely captured in cost savings terms, explaining, "many of the benefits generated through this standard will occur as a result of data exchange enabling, streamlining business processes and creating new ones based on the ability to easily manage and track service request and work order data."