Building Smart Workspaces Together
Large employers, such as Swisscom, continuously aim to optimize the well-being of their employees while utilizing their real estate as cost-effectively as possible. Changing work models driven by employee demand for hybrid work arrangements and increased flexibility are transforming office design and usage into a business decision—one that executives can not make without data.
Management would like to understand how their employees utilize the newly created collaborative space. Do we need to increase the amount of collab spaces available?
Employees, on the other hand, would like to quickly and flexibly check and book their meetings and focused working sessions for the day during their morning commute or directly in the office.
Then there's another common issue in modern corporate culture: someone has booked this meeting room but is not using it, blocking it for everyone else to have a fruitful meeting.
Collaborating on a powerful platform
Our partner, Akenza, offers occupancy monitoring on its IoT platform, providing real-time insights and 3D floor plans for managers and facility services. You may recall that Akenza's IoT platform has already been a key value-adding factor in the swimming pool monitoring app we developed together.
We love to work with Akenza
Together, we established a collaboration based on a mutual understanding and respect for each other's expertise, a pragmatic and proactive approach to helping one another, and a shared objective of developing the best possible solution for the client.
Solving the 'Booked But Empty' Problem
This time, we developed a fully responsive occupancy monitoring app for Swisscom. It puts occupancy data for desks, meeting rooms, and the cafeteria at the fingertips of employees, allowing them to book the desired space flexibly.
The 3D floorplan makes it intuitive to select and locate the right space, while signage screens in the building itself help employees easily spot occupancy information as they navigate the office floors.
IoT sensors capturing data now also circumvent the booked-but-free problem for employees desperately looking for a meeting room.
The Akenza platform also offers detailed data analytics dashboards for facility managers, helping them to analyze trends, identify anomalies, and trigger respective notifications. Reporting helps to improve the planning of the precious resource - office space. The scalable solution built on this horizontal platform enables extension to other use cases, such as indoor air quality monitoring, dynamic cleaning, or on-demand services.
The Akenza IoT platform helps us to reduce the cost and complexity of building smart, connected applications. Hence, we're already looking forward to the next steps we'll take together.