CB Richard Ellis, or CBRE Group, is a Fortune 500 company and one of the largest commercial real estate services and investment firms in the world. Servicing almost every industry, and providing solutions to organizations of all sizes in every geography, the group has a history stretching back 80+ years.

“At CBRE, we use Zoho to build the framework for other teams to enter and process data—either manually or with the help of APIs. For a company like CBRE, the best part of adopting Zoho Creator was that the pricing structure is based on user count and not on the amount of data.”

Benjamin Moorman, Sr. Strategic Sourcing Manager, CBRE

The challenge

Being a real estate enterprise, running workflows and business processes on spreadsheets wasn't viable if CBRE wanted to scale new heights. CBRE handles data to the tune of ten million records daily, making digitization inevitable. Their data analytics team looked for solutions that were customizable, scalable, and secure for running end-to-end processes, and finally homed in on a lesser-known technology—low-code.

“SQL can be used for handling the data we run on, but a large section of our employees and users are not comfortable using a pro-code tool. That's where low-code and Creator comes in handy for our organization.”

Benjamin Moorman, Sr. Strategic Sourcing Manager, CBRE

The solution

CBRE built a ticketing application on Zoho Creator, which is at the core of their multi-layer data filtration and management system. It integrates with both external databases and repositories, as well as internal tools like Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics.

The forms are wired with low-code workflows that help the company keep their data updated, simultaneously making it easy for users to search for data based on multiple parameters. Using Zoho Creator's data governance and organizational features, the applications at CBRE are accessed by user persona.

Deluge, Zoho's online scripting language—which comes with guided scripting and drag-and-drop ease—is used extensively at the backend of CBRE's applications, to configure code-heavy workflows and widgets.

Zoho Creator at CBRE Group

Mac Portal - An app to manage operations

Safe - An app to manage client servers

Pricing and procurement application

User management and data governance through customer portals

Zoho Creator is the perfect database tool

CBRE leverages Zoho Creator's unified data model, which lets applications connect securely with other databases, without worrying about data formats and data storage.

Zoho Creator's cloud infrastructure configures the backend for businesses like CBRE, and lets them build solutions easily.

The drag-and-drop builder lets you build applications that can handle 30+ types of data to cover almost any enterprise business need.

Benefits and ROI

Some of the key benefits of Zoho Creator include:

Centralization of data repositories

Customization based on requirements

No more paper and spreadsheets

CBRE started their digitization journey with low-code. What are you waiting for?

Sign up for free

“Zoho Creator provides us with a repository to make all the information easily accessible for people. Permissions can be configured based on roles, and that helps us run the system efficiently.”

Benjamin Moorman, Sr. Strategic Sourcing Manager, CBRE