Corporate Reale Estate - En studie av produktionsbolagets lokalförsörjning, januari 2009

Sammanfattning: Production companies are often exposed to rapid change and turbulent business environments, whilst the facilities and premises they conduct their business from are long term commitments with a lower turnover rate than most other assets. Decisions regarding real estate are complicated by nature and often yield long term consequences which could be hard to forecast. This dilemma between short- and long term decision-making therefore requires planning and strategies aimed specifically at real estate. The core business of manufacturing firms is separated from managing and handling real estate even though real estate is vital to their day to day operations. The ways responsibilities are distributed vary between organizations. Managing and handling real estate within a company which core business isn´t primarily real estate is often denoted Corporate Real Estate (CRE). The purpose of this study was to examine how companies which are not primarily in the real estate business organized their work related to CRE issues. Furthermore the aim was to identify the occurrence of strategies and policies regarding CRE and the factors that should be considered when a CRE strategy is created. The study also examined how CRE could potentially generate value adding effects to a company’s core business. The study which was conducted is qualitative, based on previous research in the subject of CRE and a case study where eight production companies were interviewed about CRE management. It was found that manufacturing firms approached CRE related challenges in different ways. An observation was that some kind of CRE strategy was generally present. The study also indicated that the development of such strategies should be linked to the overall strategy of the company, be transparent and made available to all employees making decisions regarding CRE. In addition the CRE strategy should be documented. Active involvement from CRE units in higher level planning and strategy development was sparse; instead most CRE units adapted their strategies with regards to the company’s overall business strategies. Another evident finding was that production companies have noticed the complexity of CRE and had some kind of central organization with companywide CRE responsibilities. In addition it was obvious that production companies realized benefits in active CRE management.