Why ERP alone can’t support modern real estate and facilities
The limits of ERP your buildings already feel
If buildings could talk, they’d tell you that ERP was never designed to manage the complexity of modern real estate, facilities, and assets. As expectations around compliance, sustainability, security, and performance rise, cracks begin to appear — not because ERP has failed, but because it was never built for this role.
According to IDC’s global survey of more than 1,000 IT leaders, spreadsheets and ERP systems still dominate facilities operations — but they’ve hit a ceiling.
This creates data silos, manual workarounds, and growing technical debt, just as IT is being asked to take greater ownership of facilities decisions.
This IDC InfoBrief explains why ERP alone falls short, how IT and facilities convergence is accelerating, and what enterprises must do to create a secure, integrated, and future-ready foundation for real estate and facilities management — without replacing ERP, but extending it intelligently.
Access the IDC InfoBrief to explore the findings and understand what’s next for enterprise real estate and facilities.
IDC Global Survey: Why ERP alone falls short
Every building has a story to tell – about how it’s being used, where energy is being wasted, which assets are under strain, and how its performance affects the business. The challenge is that most businesses can’t hear them. Data sits in silos, systems don’t connect, and the real story of your built environment stays hidden.
But with Planon, your buildings get a voice that everyone can understand.
By unifying operational, technical, and financial intelligence in one platform, and connecting it directly into SAP, Planon reveals what your buildings have been trying to tell you: how to better support clean-core strategies, reduce integration risks, and improve compliance accuracy.
If your buildings could talk… Planon is how you’d finally hear them.
What sets Planon apart
Inspiring 3 key outcomes for real estate and facilities
Make Real Estate and Facilities Management (REFM) a fully aligned extension of your SAP landscape
The key insight: Building, and asset data rarely flows cleanly into SAP because traditional Real Estate and Facilities Management solutions rely on fragmented data and custom integrations – which introduce architectural risk, upgrade constraints, and limit clean core principles.
The key takeaway: Planon provides the only Real Estate and Facilities Management SAP solution extension on the market, delivered with standard, out-of-the-box integration via SAP BTP – preserving upgradeability and giving IT teams a stable, compliant, enterprise-ready architecture from day one.Bring real estate into your digital ERP core
The key insight: Real estate represents one of the organization’s largest cost centers, yet it’s often operated through disparate tools with incompatible data structures, making it impossible to achieve SAP-level accuracy, auditability, and lifecycle traceability.
The key takeaway: Planon applies ERP-grade governance and process orchestration by unifying asset, maintenance, sustainability, and financial data into one system. The result: trusted reporting, tight financial integration, and end-to-end lifecycle traceability.One platform that brings your whole world together
The key insight: Modern buildings are full of intelligence – in their systems, sensors, and assets – yet it can be hard to act on this insight when data is scattered, teams work in isolation, and the available technology speaks in different languages.
The key takeaway: Planon unifies people, processes, and building technology into one intelligence platform – giving you a single, dynamic view of how spaces are used, how assets behave, and how all of it influences both performance and cost.
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Welcome to a more cohesive way of working
We identified Planon as the established global leader in building management software, and its standardized integration with SAP® Cloud ERP made it a natural fit with our SAP, cloud-first strategy.
