Not just a fairytale – a perfectly tailored system for RVI’s multifaceted business model

Implementing requirements-based solutions is the bread and butter of PROMOS’ working and project approach. Based on a standardised basic structure, the customer-specific individualisation requirements are determined and then implemented. This saves time and money on both sides while ensuring optimal achievement of the objectives. Within the RVI corporate group, RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung GmbH has now placed its trust in the Berlin digitisation experts, who started their search for an individual solution based on their specific business model and wide range of available services at the beginning of 2019. Today, the real-estate company works successfully with SAP^® and benefits from perfectly tailored customising. To find out what makes the system so special and which challenges the project brought with it, lets take a look back at last year.

The RVI corporate group – a real-estate company with a broad range of services

The RVI corporate group’s service portfolio ranges from property development – including land acquisition and property planning – to the sale and professional management based on a condominium owner association, rental management of the condominiums and building management of the property. This component of residential-property and condominium management must be shown separately in the accounts.

“With our business model, we meet the requirements of a whole range of different rental, tenancy and service contracts for various property relationships. In the past, these differences resulted in growing manual posting effort. When it came to introducing SAP^® RE-FX, with PROMOS we specifically chose a service provider with a wide range of expertise and specialist knowledge who we believed would be up to the task of designing a solution that matched our business case,” says Edina Szabó, Managing Director of RVI.

Tales of management and rentals – RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung GmbH has a number of special contract constellations

To give a brief impression of the diverse contract constellations at RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung GmbH, we will quickly introduce just two business cases here for which accounting was to be automated as much as possible during the system launch:

In the condominium management business model, the owner outsources the rental management tasks for the condominium to RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung GmbH.

The joint acquisition of a commercial unit by multiple investors in one real estate object within a condominium owner association is a special case. Here, the assessments must also be requested and invoiced according to the respective ownership shares (fractions) and the rental payments also have to be divided.

In the previously described business transactions and the resulting service and rental contracts, RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung GmbH processes and allocates the payment flows for rental and operation costs, assessments and operating cost statements, service fees and VAT in its accounting in a clear, customer-friendly way with the support of SAP^® so that the best possible overview is automatically provided for the owners and the tenants as well as RVI itself.

Ralf Walter, authorised signatory and manager, RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung GmbH

The pilot phase – intensive testing is half the battle

To determine whether PROMOS would be capable of meeting the fundamental requirements of RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung GmbH and identify the precise individualisation needs, a pilot phase started in July 2019. Selected users were provided with a prototype for test purposes. “This showed us that the PROMOS system was suitable for our needs and offered the potential to automate further tasks in many areas. In close and constructive agreement, we set out the areas in which there is still a need for individualisation, and PROMOS then implemented this with immense specialist knowledge and commitment,” Walter reports.

Going live – step by step to success

A successful implementation project does not run smoothly at all times, but can also be characterised by constructively overcoming hurdles. In this case, the greater challenge was transferring the data from the legacy system. Due to the ERP system that had been used until that point, the data from the highly complex contractual relationships of RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung GmbH was not available in the logic that the SAP^® system requires for accounting management. “PROMOS supported us with preparing the data and actively sought a solution to the problem. Only at the point at which automated transformation of the data was no longer possible did we have to begin manual post-processing of the data records,” says Walter, describing the additional, unforeseeable workload that had to be completed before the go-live. Then, in March 2020, the step-by-step system go-live was started with the first debit position. Other modules gradually moved over as well, such as deposit management, the dunning program, business plan and, finally, the key area of assessment statements.

Summary

At RVI Vermietung und Verwaltung, around 40 users now successfully work with an SAP^® system that provides individual solutions to meet the requirements of their specific business model. Summing up, Managing Direct Szabó concludes: “Apart from the strongly solution-oriented approach of PROMOS, one thing that really must be highlighted is the constructive interaction between those involved on the project. At all times, everyone worked together as a team to achieve the project objective. We are extremely proud of our employees who have demonstrated that they are capable of getting to grips with a system that is entirely new to them very quickly”. For the coming year, the next step will be to test the integration of mobile topics as well as process automation with easysquare.