There are lots of reasons to love your IWMS – generating detailed work orders, automating preventative maintenance, and seeing portfolio-wide energy use metrics.
What is IWMS? Ideally, these systems offer a centralized platform for real estate portfolio management, including infrastructure and facilities. During the last 20 years, IWMS solutions have become increasingly more sophisticated, expanding feature sets to help with things like sustainability, efficiency, and seeing global footprints for space planning.
But it’s also true that Strategic Space Planning requires occupancy analytics, and there are critical ways a software platform dedicated to occupancy analytics can align with an organization’s IWMS strategy.
Here are 4 to consider when looking at your portfolio.
1) What’s real? The Limitations of Scheduling Data: Booking and reservation data often gives you only a piece of the true utilization story. For starters, you aren’t able to see spaces that may be underutilized but aren’t “bookable” – cafes, community spaces, and lounges. It’s also impossible to know actual attendance and determine whether department heads, employees, or visitors are actually using the spaces they reserve.
2) Static v. Dynamic Data: If you rely on data from space audits, or even badge systems which are vulnerable to big data gaps, then it’s unlikely your data inputs can keep up with real utilization rates. With continuous data analytics onsite, CRE leaders can make decisions citing the latest, most reliable utilization rates, based on actual usage.
3) Reporting! Show, Don’t Tell: To have an impact across cross-functional teams and make a solid case for allocating – or taking away – spaces, global leaders of workplace strategies and portfolios require reports that are easy to share and understand.
4) Granularity: A recent CBRE/CoreNet study (March 2023) said utilization rates have surpassed all other metrics when it comes to making actionable decisions across portfolios, a direct result of hybrid work and the need to understand underutilized and also popular spaces.
To make this metric matter, CRE leaders would need to know utilization rates that go beyond building utilization rates and offer floor and department-level views. To start, many customers choose to deploy a Wi-Fi occupancy analytics solution, and pair it with sensors only where necessary, after they have identified portfolio locations that require attention.
Spotlight on Utilization, Occupancy Intelligence
Utilization data is the key to understanding the new realities of hybrid working environments, according to the 2022-2023 CBRE Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights Report.
“Economic uncertainty and hybrid work are placing new emphasis on quantifying the cost of underutilized space,” the report stated. “As a result, corporate real estate leaders need to measure the way space is planned and how space is used in real life.”
The report also spoke to the power of presentation, and reporting, highlighting that many organizations struggle with articulating the value of utilization data, so such efforts fail to gain organizational support or funding.
To learn more about how the Lambent Spaces platform can help you understand utilization rates, see our short video explainer here.
