The Space Management Stack By AgilQuest World class competition demands near perfection in an organization`s products and serices. The same is true for the management of facilities and real estate.

Facilities that run smoothly are critical to the success of all fast-growing, highly competitive organizations. With the proper information at hand, facility and real estate managers can add people without adding more real estate, consolidate their facilities, and optimize their real estate portfolio.

Addressing these issues requires a systematic, accurate, ubiquitous, and daily tracking of information related to the four layers of the “Space Management Stack.” The four layers are Space Inventory, Allocation, Scheduled Use, and Actual Use.

• The Space Inventory Layer: This layer primarily deals with leases, number of buildings, floors, floor plans, and square footage (in its various “standard” forms) and the number of people that the buildings must support. This layer represents the foundation for all other layers.
• The Allocation Layer: Once an organization defines its inventory of real estate, it moves up to the next level of space management, the Allocation Layer. This layer deals primarily with blocking and stacking, departmental seat allocation information, common area allocations, charge backs for financial accounting, and move management. The Inventory and Allocation Layers are primarily focused on the planning function, and typically deal with entities at the group or department level.
  
  

In the next two layers, the attention turns to putting in processes and tools that manage and operate space at the individual person or workspace level.

• The Scheduled Use Layer: The Scheduled Use Layer deals with the management of shared or collaborative workspaces used by many people for relatively short periods of time. Publishing availability, and locating rooms, people, and meetings become important functions. Scheduling also brings the component of time to assigned seating, creating the capability to measure churn rates and to track use of space over time for each individual or department.
• The Actual Use Layer: Once an organization knows its inventory of space, its planned use, and has systems in place to handle use of space over time, it has the building blocks in place for the Actual Use Layer. This layer deals with measuring the actual use of the real estate asset (by building, by floor, by workspace, etc.) and the amount used by each person supported. Organizations that achieve this layer of space management capability can plan, invest, divest, and program space based on what its organization truly uses, thus achieving the highest level of space optimization.

The accuracy of the information for these four layers requires a systematic approach to data collection. In most organizations the data required is already being collected, but might remain within the data banks of siloed applications or “data sources.” For example, the data maintained in the HR system, the CAFM system, the financial system, the telephone system, and the security system have pertinent data that can be used to accurately maintain the four layers. All that is needed is a way to bring the data together in an organized manner, resulting in a “data mart” of space management information.

Space Management in Real Time

The centerpiece of the system is a workplace management system. This automatically collects the data from the data sources from the data sources in real time, filters the data for space management use, and deposits the relavent information in the data mart. This process not only ensures data accuracy, it also eliminates the errors and costs associated with manual data collection while recognizing the changes in the mobility patterns of people, allowing refinement of workplace policies and practices.

Functionally, the workplace managemnet system accepts inventory data from the CAFM system, employee data from the HR system, and then manages the telephone system to associate a person’s telephone extension with his workspace assignment. The workplace management system can also handle short-term space reservations. Finally, the system can recognize when employees use their workspaces by accepting presence events from the security system, the network system, or the telephone system.

The result of all this integration is the ability to, over time, determine the utilization of every workspace and identify the workers who would benefit most from an alternative work environment. This now meets the objective stated earlier: adding people without adding more real estate, consolidating facilities, and optimizing the real estate portfolio.