From paper trails to a digital property management: how PIER 39 moved from excel overload, to tenant engagement, with Kinexio

PIER 39 is not a conventional shopping centre. With around 100 shops, restaurants and attractions, 12 million visitors a year and a tenant community dominated by independent businesses, managing the destination comes with its own particular challenges.

For almost 50 years, PIER 39 has been one of San Francisco’s best-known waterfront destinations.

Spread across approximately 200,000 square feet, it combines retail, restaurants and entertainment, with everything from national brands to long-established independent operators.

Around 85% of the businesses at PIER 39 are small and locally owned.

That diversity is part of what makes the destination distinctive. It also makes operating it rather different from managing a conventional shopping centre.

“We have a mix of national tenants and locally-owned small businesses that have owned their shop since The PIER’s opening in 1978,” explains Alicia Mier.

The customer base is equally varied. PIER 39 welcomes approximately 12 million visitors each year, with the profile changing continually according to school holidays, international tourism and major events taking place across the Bay Area.

For the management team, that means supporting an unusually diverse collection of businesses; with very different teams, operating models and levels of digital maturity.

And until relatively recently, many of the processes connecting them were surprisingly analogue.

Different departments had developed their own ways of working, creating a collection of separate processes and information sources.

“Every department, every function within our property works a little bit in a silo with their own systems,” says Alicia. “It was a very analogue way of working with many, many Excel spreadsheets. None of them consistently formatted”

The individual processes worked.

The difficulty came when PIER 39 needed to join the information together.

Looking at one incident or one reporting period was possible. Identifying recurring behaviour, understanding trends or finding historical information quickly was considerably harder.

One seemingly simple example illustrates the problem particularly well: tenant violations related to minimum hours of operation.

Security would send an Excel spreadsheet recording nightly violations. If the same tenant repeatedly opened late or closed early, recognising the pattern meant piecing together information from multiple records.

There was another problem too. Tenants could dispute what had happened.

“We were starting to get more tenants saying, ‘Well, there’s no proof that we weren’t open. Our employee was in the store.’ Then it becomes he said, she said.”

The need for clearer evidence ultimately became one of the strongest catalysts for change.

As Kinexio developed, however, the potential use case at PIER 39 became much broader.

The platform could provide somewhere for tenants to access information, interact with the management team and increasingly complete tasks themselves.

But the business case that ultimately accelerated the project came from security.

The ability to digitise operating hour violation reporting meant security teams could create a clear record of what had happened, including photographic evidence, while PIER 39 could see all the resulting information together.

“Now everything’s in one place. We’re seeing, ‘Hey, we’ve got some repeat offenders.’ That was a huge one.”

Instead of debating whether a store had been open at the required time, the conversation could become considerably simpler.

“It’s so much more black and white. Here’s the photo of your door closed and your lights are off.”

For PIER 39, this wasn’t simply about digitising a paper process. It changed the quality of the information available to the management team.

A single implementation approach was unlikely to work equally well for everyone.

“Sometimes it’s easier when they’re able to implement new things with people who are familiar to them.”

PIER 39 began preparing its tenants before launch through town hall meetings, explaining what was coming and why.

Alicia then contacted businesses individually and, where necessary, sat down personally with tenants to help them download the app and understand how to use it.

That included working directly with some older small-business owners who were less accustomed to adopting new technology.

Behind the scenes, PIER 39 worked closely with the Kinexio team to configure and test the platform before launch.

“I appreciated that flexibility, and Trish [Director of Strategic Accounts & Customer Success, Kinexio] was always there to offer her support. If we noticed a little bug, the response was always immediate, ‘Oh, no problem.’ She was so quick.”

The rollout took slightly longer than originally anticipated, largely because the PIER 39 team wanted to be confident the experience was right before putting it into tenants’ hands.

But when the switch was finally made, Alicia’s concerns about adoption proved largely unfounded.

“I was really, really worried about adoption and implementation. But they got it right away.”

In fact, one of the first reactions from tenants was to ask when they could do even more through it.

With Kinexio, tenants can increasingly manage these interactions themselves.

“Being able to have that in their control, I think, is appreciated.”

Alicia has also started noticing a subtle change in behaviour.

Rather than automatically contacting the management office whenever they need information, some tenants now look in Kinexio first.

“We have some national tenants saying, ‘Hey, I checked the app. I didn’t see this information, can you tell me?’ It’s nice knowing that they’re utilising that as a first tool to self-serve. It also gives us insight as to information that may be missing from the platform.”

That shift matters.

Tenant engagement technology is often judged by the number of communications it sends. At PIER 39, part of its value comes from the opposite: removing superfluous communications.

Tenants might complete handwritten forms,then the management team would collect and log the information, follow up with businesses and later check whether the same promotion was still running.

Kinexio gives tenants the ability to manage more of that process themselves.

The functionality is still being developed and adoption is ongoing, but the potential efficiency gain is substantial.

Alicia estimates that the combination of ticketing and self-service processes is already saving days of administration each month.

“The follow-up, the emails, collecting, tracking, having to log it ourselves, taking the scanned piece of paper where they handwrite their discount offering and then following up… that is days of work every month.”

The opportunity is not simply to reduce administration.

For a property containing around 100 different businesses, making it easier for tenants to contribute their own offers also gives the wider PIER 39 community another mechanism for promoting the variety of experiences available across the destination.

Elsewhere, adoption has required more personal support.

That distinction matters because PIER 39 is not trying to turn every tenant into the same kind of user.

The platform has instead had to adapt to the reality of the destination.

“The whole team has been so supportive and so helpful with making us feel comfortable with our unique property… not being a traditional shopping centre or mall.”

For Alicia, that support was an important part of giving the team confidence to introduce the platform across such a diverse tenant community.

Maintenance ticketing could have an even greater impact.

Today, reporting an overflowing trash can, a leak or a broken restroom door handle may still mean making a phone call, sending an email or texting a photograph to somebody within the team.

Alicia estimates PIER 39 could receive somewhere in the region of five to ten maintenance requests a day, with considerably more potential activity during periods such as the rainy season.

Bringing those requests into a structured workflow would give tenants an easier way to report problems while helping the PIER 39 team prioritise, track and respond to them.

The demand is already there.

“The first thing [tenants] asked was, ‘Oh my gosh, can we do maintenance reporting through this now?’”

PIER 39 is now exploring how that workflow could be structured, including different priority levels, before expanding the system internally.

Additional property security systems, sales tracking and further accounting processes are also being considered for future phases.

Processes that once depended on spreadsheets, paper, phone calls and individual emails are becoming easier to track. Tenants have somewhere to find information themselves. Security reporting provides clearer evidence. Repeat behaviour is easier to identify. And routine administrative work is beginning to move away from the management team.

For a destination approaching its 50th year, it is an important part of a much wider transition.

As Alicia puts it:

“We’ve really just scratched the surface of what Kinexio’s abilities are.”

And for a property that spent decades successfully operating through analogue processes, perhaps that is the most interesting part of the story.

PIER 39 has not digitised simply for the sake of digitising.

It has started replacing hundreds of small, disconnected interactions with something easier for both the management team and the businesses they support.

And there is considerably more still to come.

“I sing Kinexio’s praises. The whole team has been so supportive and helpful. It’s been really great, and everybody’s very happy.”