For a city on a peninsula, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the waterfront is a vibrant and integral part of the identity of San Francisco. The Port of San Francisco, or SF Port for short, has the distinctly challenging task of monitoring and maintaining the 7.5-mile stretch of waterfront home to many municipal and commercial enterprises. Between managing rental applications for commercial waterfront property, developing public space, and preserving the SF Port ecosystem at large, there is a lot of data to manage.
Like the permitting applications and consultations for Historic England, those leasing applications, in particular, were a significant headache for SF Port, as the approval process was complex and required a lot of elbow grease from the various teams within the organization. The organization’s asset management platform heavily siloed access to information and made lease approval an individual effort. Due to system constraints, approval processes were further encumbered by reliance on paper and PDF documents. The more time warehouses, piers, and other commercial properties sat empty, the less revenue SF Port generated.
Defining the Asset Management Marketplace
From the outside, a cultural heritage inventory seems to be an unorthodox choice for solving SF Port’s problems. Many asset management systems are available to organizations today, including OpenGov, Accela, in4, Maximo, and Cityworks, to name a few. But Arches proved to be the perfect solution.
As an asset management system, Arches is defined by its adaptability and accessibility—although not in the oxymoronic sense you might be picturing. To be sure, Arches is purpose-built to model and manage the richness and complexity of your asset data. Note the operative word here is “your”.
Most other asset management systems are less focused on pre-existing inventory and instead focus on tracking the work that needs to be done regarding it. This mentality applies to more than just the assets themselves but also to pre-existing business processes. Client processes will need to change to accommodate the system.
The Arches Difference
Arches is foundationally different. It’s agile, quick to implement, and customizable to the needs of organizations that employ it. For SF Port, Farallon collaborated closely with SF Port staff to build the precise commercial office lease management application they needed on the Arches platform. Specifically, we built a custom frontend Arches portal for the public to submit leasing application data directly into Arches via a streamlined data entry form—goodbye document applications! Internally, Farallon also worked to customize SF Port’s Arches implementation to ensure that application approval processes leveraged meaningful asset data without needing to integrate additional separate business systems. In so doing, application reviews become an institutional record, propelled by accessible and accurate data, rather than an individual champion having to take on the brunt of the work.
Arches is more than a cultural heritage inventory. It is a powerful and customizable asset management platform that doesn’t prescribe business processes to achieve client goals. You and your organization are the experts in your field—leverage that expertise with a collaborative partner to ensure your unique approach can fully flourish. Applications like the SF Port Leasing Application give the Arches community at large a formula by which unique business processes can be encoded into Arches quickly and are easily maintainable over time.
Farallon is committed to providing future-oriented solutions to give our clients the flexibility to adjust their internal systems to match evolving business landscapes. Adaptable data management platforms like Arches enable teams to leverage data across many situations, giving organizations key insights to formulate strategic business decisions.
