Workplace Tech & Software

How to Determine if OfficeSpace Software is Right for Your Organization

David Spence
October 11th, 2018

What do you value most in a digital platform? At OfficeSpace, we believe tools should be powerful, flexible and adaptable to any work process. Because we design with that ethos in mind, we also believe our platform has a lot to offer any company that chooses to work with us. And with our active, refinement-first design process and dedicated approach to problem-solving, you’ll likely feel the same way. If you find your current selection of facilities management tools lacking—or you have yet to decide on one—consider the following questions and all the ways OfficeSpace software could work for you.

1. Can employees quickly find what they need?

The larger the office, the more difficult it can be for employees to find the resources, spaces and people they need to stay productive. OfficeSpace’s approach to this time-stealing problem is simple. Whatever employees need to find, whatever resources you have on hand—from printer drivers to open seating—we can incorporate it into your FM solution. With Mobile Visual Directory, personnel can employ their mobile devices to find fellow employees or shared resources like copiers and scanner clusters; Visual Directory for Kiosks, meanwhile, brings the same idea to touchscreen-based floor kiosks, helping newcomers adapt to the new office and established employees adjust to floor plan changes, available on the kiosk in real time.

2. Do your tools align with your seating strategy—or do they force you to adapt?

Some offices allow employees to choose where they sit. Others put facility managers in charge of arrangements. In either event, the OfficeSpace platform’s series of features work to suit the process instead of forcing the process to adapt to what’s available. Whoever decides seating, the other party receives an alert, keeping everyone in the facilities management chain up-to-date—and by the same token, putting seating assignments, move requests and other critical FM functions all in one easy-to-use interface. Add in the ability to test advanced scenarios prior to making permanent changes and you have a single tool designed to fit any seating strategy you may employ, now or in the future.

3. How does data play into your facilities management tasks? Do you “know the numbers” of your workplace?

Review your office data at a glance

In the workplace, data and analytics often mean the difference between an informed decision and a hunch-based gamble. OfficeSpace’s approach to data allows you to view information in a variety of formats, enhancing your ability to build plans and make decisions. Usage data can be viewed in a report or on your floor plan, while space utilization reports help you determine exactly which areas are being used and which could be repurposed. Custom reporting features ensure your most demanding requirements get the deep-dive insights they deserve. Why take guesses—even educated ones—about your space when you can know the answers for certain?

4. Could your hot desking or hoteling strategy use a revamp?

Many modern offices employ a hot desking strategy to promote flexibility and optimize desk and space usage—employees request and make use of whatever workspace is available to them on the day. Hoteling—a subset of hot desking that requires employees to reserve their workspace in advance—is also a rising trend in the office landscape. However a company approaches it, impermanent seating can lead to complexity that increases with the size of the roster, and scaling that complexity requires tools powerful and flexible enough to manage it all. Whether seating areas are self-serve or by-request, OfficeSpace allows check-in and reporting through a number of devices, including smartphones and tablets. Just as important, its auto-decline rules help ensure FMs only see requests they need to see. If your hoteling or hot desking schemes create unnecessary work, request an OfficeSpace demo to see how a properly-equipped strategy can make life easier for everyone.

5. Are you employing outdated facilities management solutions—or relying on your internal IT team for software?

Here at OfficeSpace, we appreciate a good spreadsheet. They’re great for certain things—but not so great for planning seating arrangements and providing detailed reports on space utilization. A step up from spreadsheets, FM software designed by your internal IT team can hold things together in the short-term—until there is a glitch, or IT becomes swamped and can’t provide timely updates. Instead of relying on clunky CAFM software or attempting to “keep the lights on” with spreadsheets and patched-together homegrown tools, choose a solution that offers a new way for your office to manage the policies and particulars of facilities management: one that has implemented ten years of user feedback to marry cutting-edge under-the-hood performance with an elegant interface. OfficeSpace treats facilities management as the business-impacting role it is, and we’re on hand to make sure everything runs smoothly.

6. Is your current CAFM or IWMS in a silo?

How does OfficeSpace qualify as a platform? Simple: it extends the capabilities of the applications it touches, and vice versa. OfficeSpace comes with a number of prebuilt integrations for the tools and data your company relies on most, including third-party applications like Slack and Skype for Business, and directory tools like Active Directory, LDAP and Workday. Among other benefits, this allows FMs to see vital employee data direct from the floorplan, wherever an employee happens to sit that day. It can even integrate with sensors from companies like VergeSense and Qbic, further enhancing its occupancy and desk-booking capabilities. Best of all, the software can often be integrated with solutions on an à la carte basis: if you don’t see the tools you need in our current list, get in touch with us and we’ll leverage our existing expertise to understand what’s needed and create an integration that suits your needs. Why keep your systems in silos when they can all aid your facilities management processes?

7. Do your tools keep up with the size of your business today? What about tomorrow?

Scalable software solutions that can grow with your business

What is your current roster size? What will it be in five years? From 200 employees to 20,000+, OfficeSpace software can scale to meet your needs. That means direct support, of course, as well as the ability to find what works best as your company grows. When it comes to planning out your layouts and seating arrangements, our scenario setting allows you to build and test to your heart’s content before committing to a single change. If you’re concerned about the transition from your system to ours, rest easy: we can build our customizable floor plans from of a variety of file types, so whether you send us your original in JPG, PDF or XLS, you can be in our system and up and running within days. Depending on your office, “growth” may mean a larger roster or a bigger facility, or both; OfficeSpace can support all of the above with ease.

8. Do you rely on IT ticketing or email to handle work orders?

IT tickets are for IT and email is for basic communication. Trying to fit either into a facilities management context is a recipe for inefficiency. OfficeSpace puts work orders where you can see them, under the same umbrella as your other core FM tasks. Putting requests in a single place increases visibility, gets to-dos out of your inbox and improves your ability to consolidate information over time and forecast future maintenance. There’s no need to shoehorn processes into a tool that wasn’t built to handle them—OfficeSpace software puts them right where they’re supposed to go.

 

FREE GUIDE: 10 METRICS EVERY FACILITY MANAGER SHOULD MEASURE

If you answer yes to even a handful of these questions, it might be time to take your office management software to the next level. OfficeSpace has helped many companies consolidate their space management solutions and optimize their everyday facility functions. Your organization could be the next to benefit from OfficeSpace’s game-changing approach to facilities management.

Request a free demo of OfficeSpace, and let us show you how we can help.

Photo Credits: Shutterstock / REDPIXEL.PL, Shutterstock / Jacob Lund, Shutterstock / dotshock