How an IWMS can Support Business Outcomes and Enhance Your Workplace

Making sure your facilities run smoothly is a complicated process, with multiple information systems and the need to manage everything from seating arrangements, floor plans, and move requests, to the overall workplace experience, onboarding processes, and parking spot allocation and monitoring — among other tasks.

Doing all of that is no small feat — especially when you also need to find a solution that employees will actually use.

When UFG Insurance (UFG) found gaps in their facilities team’s information that were causing multiple inefficiencies, they knew they would need to implement an IWMS to streamline their facilities management. After evaluating five vendors, they implemented iOFFICE’s workplace management software in 2018.

Here’s how iOFFICE helped UFG gain the visibility they needed to optimize processes throughout their entire organization.

Bridging information gaps

Founded in 1946, UFG is a multibillion-dollar asset insurance carrier licensed in 46 states. With over 1,100 employees across six locations in the United States, facilities management became a struggle due to limited real estate information management systems.

Keeping track of workplace arrangements and floor plans became a big challenge for their facilities team. Then, they deployed iOFFICE’s workplace management solution to support move management and gain visibility into seating arrangements.

Bridging the gaps between business needs and employee productivity is a notoriously bumpy process. And it’s something that can only be accomplished by knowing what’s happening and being ready to impact it intelligently.

For UFG, immediate access to their real-time data meant they could understand what was going on and be more intentional about what they hoped to achieve and how they’d do it. iOFFICE gave them a way to reference and track which desks and meeting rooms were being used and also simplified the search for coworkers, particularly for new employees and technicians, which helped boost their productivity.

Enhancing the workplace

Over time, the efficiencies achieved with iOFFICE across their entire system allowed them to address other workplace needs. Leveraging these solutions across eight office buildings and several departments helped them improve multiple processes throughout their organization.

Smoother onboarding, better workplace experience

Before iOFFICE, there wasn’t an easy way for new employees to navigate the office. Finding where each department was located and which floor they needed to go to was a challenge. And employees struggled with locating their colleagues and conference rooms.

Ashley McCarthy, Facilities Project Manager at UFG, explained, “With the Hummingbird app by iOFFICE, employees can easily locate and get directions to a meeting room, department, or specific coworker.”

UFG now automatically enrolls new hires in the iOFFICE platform when they join the team, so they can find their desk and use the Hummingbird app to navigate around the office, making it easy to find their coworkers and other departments.

Another bonus: Even when someone has recently moved desks, mailroom staff can easily find where a recipient’s new seat is located.

More efficient move requests

Prior to using iOFFICE for move management, employees could move at their discretion. The FM team relied on employees to provide updates when moving and had to modify floor plans manually. When someone forgot to notify them, they’d have to search for the employee’s new desk.

Without precision, the move request process was inefficient and costs were difficult to report. Now, employees use the Hummingbird app to submit move requests directly to the facilities team, who can see all the requests at one time and find a new placement for an employee quickly.

Ashley explained how UFG benefited from using the Hummingbird app to track the frequency of employee moves and analyze the costs and benefits of each move. As she put it, “This data enabled us to restrict employee move requests as well as put more thought into people moving.”

Simplified parking space allocation process

At the UFG headquarters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, parking lot management used to be a source of frustration. They struggled to allocate parking spaces to employees and found that they had fewer spots than they needed.

Another challenge: employees often lent their spots to their coworkers when they were out of office. The FM team would scan through lengthy security footage to discover who was using each space and confirm if employees were parking in their assigned spaces.

When UFG started using iOFFICE to manage their parking space allocation process, they noticed a rapid increase in efficiency. Rather than scanning security videos and having to reach out to employees for verification, iOFFICE stores employee information like parking spot number, employees’ car models, and license plate numbers. That makes verification easy and saves valuable time.

And when employees are working out of the office, they can use the Hummingbird app to notify management who will be using their space while they’re gone.

More accurate finance calculations

Not only has the FM team been able to reallocate their time for more pressing facilities-related tasks, other departments have benefitted from iOFFICE, too. Their finance department, for instance, uses the space management solution to get accurate square footage measurements so they can calculate how much each department uses in each building.

According to Ashley, the original purpose UFG had in mind was space management; however, “a benefit we later realize was that with accurate square footage of each department, we could easily track and charge back costs to specific departments.”

Unlocking the full potential of the workplace

Originally, UFG saw iOFFICE as the solution to their move management challenges. After learning more about other solutions iOFFICE offers and receiving positive feedback from users, UFG decided to leverage their IWMS to support several areas of the workplace.

They added the Hummingbird app, enabling employees to find coworkers, conference rooms, and workspaces. It also provides a way to submit maintenance and move requests and positively impacted productivity for the mailroom staff. More recently, UFG has used iOFFICE to manage on-site parking and to help their accounting team with space calculations.

Users found iOFFICE’s interface clear and intuitive, so employees learn and adopt it very quickly. Now UFG staff use the platform on a daily basis to find people, get directions to meeting rooms, and submit requests. Because employees love using iOFFICE, the system captures more precise data — data UFG uses to make more purposeful workplace management decisions.

Over the years, UFG has expanded their workplace management system and deployed iOFFICE across more buildings. iOFFICE scales to support their workplace so UFG’s FM team is able to focus on solving critical problems and achieving company goals.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your workplace? Schedule a demo to see how iOFFICE can transform your office operations.