Today PeopleCube announced Workplace BI, the industry’s first business intelligence tool that enables organizations to effectively monitor, measure, and manage utilization of real estate to maximize value and reduce overhead. Workplace BI enables organizations to gain an accurate view of both current and future real-estate needs, potentially enabling corporations to save millions of dollars in direct operating costs within their real-estate portfolio.
“Real estate is the second largest cost for most organizations, so companies are looking to make the best use of the space they have and to divest under-performing real-estate assets,” said Jeffrey R. Roof, vice president of product management for PeopleCube. “PeopleCube’s Workplace BI enables everyone from top management to hands-on project managers to gain insight into actual real-estate utilization and to predict future needs. This helps customers attain their space-related goals, whether that means divesting unneeded space, implementing alternative workspace programs to promote efficient utilization of office space, or accommodating growth without expanding their real-estate footprint.”
Look to the Future, Not Just the Past
Traditional reporting tracks only events that have already happened, whereas the PeopleCube Workplace BI solution enables companies to understand how their space and assets are being used currently and in the future. It provides the trending information management needs to make adjustments based on projections of usage and requirements in order to defray unnecessary expenses down the road.
Measure to Manage
Facility management systems track data on space usage (for example, assigned or vacant), maintenance utilities, and cost allocation. Data about alternative workspace, meeting rooms, and videoconferencing services resides in the resource management system. Yet another system contains data on actual utilization (e.g., visitors, presence detection, and energy usage).
Only when data is extracted from these various systems and transformed into useful information can it be used for tracking, measuring, problem detection, analysis, and planning. As the information is evaluated, trends emerge, and management can refine processes based on organizational needs or external impacts on the company facilities.
PeopleCube’s Workplace BI aggregates data from various enterprise systems and transform it into information that enables customers to measure actual utilization against plan, institute continuous process improvement, and achieve effective utilization of space.
Accurate Utilization of Space
“When an organization has the right amount of space to meet the needs of the user community, we call this accurate utilization of space,” said Roof. “As more organizations deploy alternative workspace programs, such as hoteling, accurate utilization of space is more difficult to determine.”
In the past, most real estate was assigned and allocated to a department within the organization based on industry standards. Today, a large percentage of space is available on a first come, first served basis for use by multiple departments. In this type of environment, getting an accurate picture of how space is being utilized can be difficult. When an organization looks at planned use via reservations, and not actual use (taking into consideration drop-ins, no-shows, etc.) the result is a false view of the actual utilization of space. This leads to inaccurate planning when developing new alternative workspace at other locations. By combining data from multiple systems, such as reservations, building access, and network access within Workplace BI, a more accurate view of actual utilization can be seen, resulting in more precise future planning.
The Right Information for Each Role
People filling various roles within an organization have to look at the same data in different ways to carry out their own particular mission. PeopleCube’s Workplace BI provides a variety of views of information and makes it possible for those who require more granularity to easily drill down into details—without having to run multiple reports to narrow in on what they need.
For example, CEOs take a high-level, forward-looking enterprisewide view. They look for trends in performance, compare the performance of one corporate facility with another, and benchmark the entire company against others in the industry.
A corporate real-estate vice president for a large organization, who might be in charge of managing millions of square feet of space, would look for opportunities to reduce square footage: even as little as a two-percent reduction would mean dropping hundreds of thousands of square feet of space. In locations such as New York or Chicago, that would add up to major cost savings.
Facility managers, in contrast, need a more granular view. They might look at enterprisewide usage of conference rooms, then drill down by division and location to see how efficiently conference-room space is actually being used at specific locations.
Project managers are focused on their own particular mission. Someone in charge of an alternative workspace initiative might use Workplace BI to review a flexible work program at one location and analyze its effectiveness before rolling it out to other divisions. To see how the initiative is executing compared to plan, they would review user adoption trends, check-in and check-out procedures, workspace preferences, utilization by department and time of day, and similar information.
About Workplace BI
Workplace BI is the first business intelligence tool for real-estate executives and other space-management personnel looking to maximize real-estate space and asset utilization throughout the organization. Designed to integrate with other enterprise data repository applications, Workplace BI provides valuable data analysis and trending information that enables organizations to actively manage current and future real-estate utilization to reduce costly overhead. For more information about Workplace BI, visit www.peoplecube.com/products-workplacebi.htm.
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