Wincasa- becoming a digital leader together with Zühlke

• Best-of-breed application platform with custom integration layer

• New flexible platform to support future growth

• Improved data availability and operational efficiency

Wincasa wants to lead the digital revolution in Swiss real estate. As Wincasa’s innovation partner, Zühlke is tasked with modernising a legacy application and making it ready for a cloud-based future.

A bold plan for digital excellence

Wincasa has a bold plan – to become a digital leader in Swiss real estate. To achieve this goal, open-heart surgery is needed to begin with: a legacy application that is used to manage every aspect of the business needs to be modernised. The system has been developed in-house over the course of 15 years, becoming an ingrained aspect of the company’s operations and culture. Although highly functional, the system poses serious challenges to Wincasa’s strategy. It does not have any APIs that could expose data to third-party apps, for instance, nor is it cloud-based. Both are crucial to achieving the goal of omnichannel mastery and creating real value-added services for tenants and owners. Wincasa approaches Zühlke for advice.

Building a best-of-breed platform

Zühlke conducts an initial legacy system assessment, and rather than rebuilding it from scratch, helps the Wincasa team to assess a number of solutions that suit its needs. This approach allows it to identify three options – ERP, real estate management, and construction project management – that could be integrated to create a best-of-breed solution. In line with Wincasa’s specifications, all three systems are cloud-enabled and ready for deployment as virtual machine clusters in the existing Microsoft Azure environment. Zühlke oversees the development and deployment process and helps to retrain the Wincasa project team in Agile methodologies.

Ready to face the future

With a future-ready solution in place, Wincasa embarks on the challenging task of migrating users and data to the new platform. The organic nature of the original real estate management platform means that extensive data cleansing and sanitising is required before it can be migrated and rolled out to the entire user base. New properties and projects are being added directly to the new platform. Wincasa stakeholders confirm that the integration layer is performing as expected and data is being synchronised between the three core applications, helping to increase productivity and operational efficiency. Wincasa now has a platform capable of scaling and flexing as its requirements change.