Store Lifecycle Management (SLM) encompasses a broad range of highly specialized software solutions. Each major component of your SLM facilitates vital workplace operations. So as your organization looks to be as lean, efficient, and competitive as possible, assembling the right combination of SLM solutions is essential.
For the most part, these operations are relatively siloed, with different departments and employees overseeing them. As a result, the components of an organization’s SLM suite (lease, site selection, maintenance, real estate transactions, construction project management, etc.) are often selected independently. That, plus the widespread availability of API integrations, has left many organizations with a mix-and-match SLM system, an amalgamation of software solutions from multiple vendors.
While API integrations and siloed SLM processes give each department and leadership team the flexibility to select the tools that best align with their own priorities and workflows, many organizations are beginning to recognize the challenges of these unwieldy multi-vendor systems. Because while the workflows these tools enable are independent, the operations they fall under are interconnected, spanning multiple departments and involving multiple processes.
Handpicking your real estate management solutions from multiple vendors may let you combine the most affordable or most sophisticated tools into one system, but when you see how that adds complexity and limits your savings opportunities, it becomes clear why more organizations are opting to consolidate their SLM spend into a single vendor.
At Tango, we believe each one of our point solutions is best in class. But the whole platform is greater than the sum of its point solutions. Here are four advantages of consolidating your SLM with Tango, instead of piecemealing a system from multiple vendors.
1. Vendor-maintained integrations
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have revolutionized software development by enabling solutions built and supported by different companies to integrate in meaningful ways. As long as software has an API, it can interact with other applications, even though it wasn’t built to do so natively (because the vendors don’t have access to each other’s source code).
For years, this universal compatibility has been a major selling point for point solutions—who cares how many vendors you work with, as long as your tools can communicate, right? But while APIs leveled the playing field and allowed organizations to prioritize solutions by cost and capabilities, rather than compatibility, there’s an issue with API integrations: you’re the one responsible for maintaining them.
When a vendor adds an API to their product, as far as they’re concerned, they’ve satisfied your need for integration capabilities: they’ve provided a path to enabling communication between tools. But it’s your job to maintain the connection. And whether these integrations require coding or not, that’s a burden you don’t want to bear.
Every time either solution releases an update or makes a significant change, you’re the party responsible for resolving any issues it creates with the integration between them. Third party integration solutions like Zapier can’t help you there, either. The more API-integrated tools in your SLM system, the more connections you have to invest in maintaining—and even if you only have an intermediary role in the process going between vendors, that combination of downtime and troubleshooting is a headache you don’t have to worry about when all your tools come from the same vendor.
With Tango, we take the responsibility of integration off your plate. And that means before we ever publish an update to one of our solutions, we’re thoroughly exploring its potential impact on our entire SLM ecosystem, testing for points of failure outside of the individual tool. If a bug emerges that affects the integration between our solutions, we devote the development and support resources to resolve the issue, rather than passing the buck to our customers or placing the blame at someone else’s feet.
2. Broad scope leads to new solutions
Store Lifecycle Management solutions fall under established categories designed to support specific operations and workflows. But sometimes, your workflows naturally lead into one another, and your tools don’t. So your workflow leads to a dead end, or else a messy process you’ve cobbled together in a spreadsheet.
For example, after seeing which leases are coming up for renewal, planning and executing real estate transactions is a natural next step—but that’s not a natural function of lease administration and accounting software. With 20% of your portfolio coming up for renewal every year, a lot of time goes into tracking options and implementing decisions, especially with larger portfolios. And it takes far more time when the natural workflow grinds to a halt due to product limitations, or you’re forced to transition to a cumbersome stepping stone you built in-house.
Since Tango provides an SLM platform, not just a single point solution, we’re free to look beyond the borders of what each tool is capable of and think about the broader real estate management operations you use them to accomplish.
Because of this, we’ve been able to create novel solutions within the SLM environment, like our Lease Transactions tool, which addresses a gap in the capabilities of lease software, site selection, and capital program management. Tango Lease Transactions streamlines the process of tracking and exercising lease options by establishing a dedicated tool with configurable workflows that automatically populates upcoming transactions.
3. Consolidated SLM support
Every new vendor you work with has their own support process—and some are better than others. Smaller vendors may primarily rely on self-help articles, chatbots, tutorial videos, or forums. You may have to jump through several hoops to actually speak to a person (who may or may not be an expert). And when you use multiple vendors, your organization has to remember how to navigate these different processes whenever you need help.
This is also true of some SLM vendors that have filled out their product offerings through acquisitions. The products and the employees and processes that support them remain siloed, so from your standpoint, each product may as well be coming from a different vendor, because it’s a completely different support experience.
That’s never the case with Tango. Whether we’ve built an SLM solution in-house or acquired it, our products and the people behind them are fully integrated. There’s one development department. One customer service department. One number to call (855-938-2646). It doesn’t matter if you need support with Tango Lease, Tango Maintenance, Tango Projects, or something else—the process and experience is the same.
4. Lower total cost of ownership
As the only true end-to-end Store Lifecycle Management provider, Tango doesn’t just look at the value an individual tool can provide to the department that uses it. We consider the ways each solution can benefit your entire organization.
Tango Lease, Tango Predictive Analytics, and Tango Maintenance are a great example of this platform-based approach. While site selection and lease administration have a lot of clear, natural overlap—you need to forecast sales and predict a location’s performance before deciding to renew, relocate, or exit when it comes up for renewal—those decisions should also directly impact your upcoming maintenance expenses and construction projects.
If you’re not going to renew, you don’t want your facility manager or a director to initiate work orders or start contracts for projects you won’t be around to benefit from. Imagine paying for a new roof, right before relocating to a new store. You might’ve just paid for a competitor’s new roof, when you could’ve just made a repair! These kinds of oversights happen all the time in organizations with large portfolios, and it’s largely a problem that stems from silo-ing your SLM capabilities.
At Tango, we’re constantly helping our customers see how the insights one team or department gleans from our tools could generate savings for another. We empower our users to see their roles and information more holistically, helping you achieve the lowest possible total cost of ownership for your SLM solutions. Because getting the most from our products means getting the most from your entire portfolio.
Experience the simplicity of a single-vendor SLM solution
For more than 20 years, Tango has helped organizations manage their real estate at scale. Whether you have dozens of locations or tens of thousands, Tango’s SLM solutions empower you to discover and capitalize on cost-saving opportunities throughout your real estate portfolio.
From site selection to lease administration and accounting, facilities maintenance, program management, and more, Tango has you covered. There’s no need to string together separate modules from different vendors and juggle multiple contracts and relationships. Our single platform has everything you need, and when you put it all together, your SLM platform can be greater than the sum of its point solutions. Want to see what Tango can do for you?
