How an organization saved 20,277 hours from no-shows in a year using ecobook
Overview
Our customer is a large public sector research organization in Singapore with over 125 meeting rooms spread across 50 locations in multiple buildings. As part of their core mission, they engage with both public and private sector organizations to co-innovate and develop new technology that is economically viable.
They also work with several overseas institutions that collaborate on several key technology projects. With 7,000 employees spread across all locations, there is a need for plenty of meeting rooms to carry out their daily activities.
The Challenge
The organization was facing a challenge with the availability of meeting rooms. Despite having 100s of meeting rooms, demand always outstripped supply. Many of the meeting rooms seemed to be booked but remained unoccupied. This scarcity resulted in a practice of booking multiple rooms for meetings “if they happened”. Department administrators would rush in to block meeting rooms even if they weren’t being used.
In addition to that, the existing booking system that they used was not solving the problem as it was internally developed and lacked critical validation and conflict-checking capability.
As user complaints mounted and reached top management, the facilities team repeatedly faced the brunt of the anger claiming that they were not doing enough to police the spaces. Spread over 50 locations, the facilities team was stretched thin and knew that their current booking system was not up to the mark and needed a major upgrade.
What they needed was a booking system that had fine-grained control over each meeting room and the added advantage of being able to proactively control and release rooms if they were not being used. In addition, analytics and reports were necessary to understand usage patterns and adjust the business rules accordingly. These were lacking in their current booking system.
The Solution
At ecobook, we did a discovery session with the facilities team and understood their pain points. This was followed by a demo of the meeting room booking system that helped them understand how ecobook can resolve the problem using its built-in set of features such as business rules, permissions, and no-show capabilities.
Once ecobook was selected as the preferred solution to their scheduling problems, we quickly helped to set up their account, load up all the facilities, and migrate their bookings into ecobook.
As part of the onboarding, we worked with the facilities team to scope the business rules that needed to be implemented such as:
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Restricted booking windows to not more than 30 days. This helped prevent bookings that were made well in advance and forgotten.
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Check-in limits of 15 minutes after the meeting starts to ensure that the rooms are being used.
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Implemented digital touchscreen panels outside meeting rooms to show the current status as well as provide an avenue for employees to check in and thereby monitor the actual usage.
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No-show grace period of 15 minutes that will automatically cancel the meeting room if there is no check-in within 15 minutes of the meeting start. For certain rooms, such as boardrooms, auto-cancellation was disabled to prevent important meetings from getting canceled.
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Setting permission restrictions to ensure departments were allocated specific zones for their meetings.
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Setting up approvals for certain spaces such as boardrooms.
- Configuring Single Sign On with their corporate directory services to ensure security and proper audit.
After a complete training session with the staff and administrators, the system was finally launched while the old one was permanently shut down.
In all, the total duration of the engagement was completed in 2 months from initial scoping to handover. This also included a migration exercise from the old system to ecobook.
The Results
After a year of operations, the facilities team was able to generate reports and analytics for the management to see.
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In the first year, they recorded 25,329 hours of no-shows. These were the number of meeting room hours freed up because no one checked in to them after booking. This figure showed the amount of lost time in meeting room usage that was going on.
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In the second year, they recorded just 5,052 hours of no-shows. A significant improvement of 80%.
By tweaking the rules based on past performance, they were able to save 20,277 hours of no-shows.
While there was pushback from the employees, eventually, many welcomed the new way of booking as meeting rooms were made available and were put to better use.
In addition to that, the complaints to the facilities team dropped by nearly 90%. This freed them up to focus on more important activities related to the overall facilities maintenance.
In Summary
From struggling to get a handle on the meeting room scheduling problems to free up 20,000 hours of meeting spaces for other meetings, ecobook has helped solve a very common problem faced in most large organizations.
The new practices have brought better utilization of meeting rooms. The lesson learned from this engagement can be summarized into a few points:
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Space management problems are real and the larger the organization the more complex the issue. The amount of lost opportunity wasted rental or operating expense, and employee frustration cannot be quantifiable without proper control and management.
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A proper booking system with critical business rules is essential to ensure that your office space is being utilized effectively. Modern workplaces are complex and their utilization must be monitored and adjusted based on the needs of its occupants.
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Change is always hard. Yet with repeated communication, education, and patience employees will begin to understand the value of the change. The larger the organization, the slower it is to change.
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