TOP ENERGY COMPANY UNITES HR AND FACILITIES WITH IWMS
With over 100 years of experience and the expertise of 42,000 employees, a top engineering conglomerate provides reliable solutions while maintaining a focus on safety and an uncompromising standard of quality.
THE PROBLEM
The Corporate Facility Manager at this engineering company is responsible for the 275,000 square foot global administrative office in Texas. She has been with the company for 12 years and, with the help of her eight-person team, supports facilities management (FM), the mailroom and reception.
Each day, the FM team works with the HR and IT departments to coordinate the onboarding of incoming employees and the offboarding of outgoing employees. Since the engineering company is growing, new employees are constantly joining its workforce, which means locating and reserving space for them can be a challenge.
In 2013, the company was months away from acquiring a significantly larger business, and finding adequate space for 25,000 new employees was a prime concern. This triggered the search for an integrated workforce management solution (IWMS). The facility manager knew they had to get a head start and find a more robust tool that could handle all the major FM functions for their growing organization. The company needed one uniform solution to manage both the workforce and the workplace.
THE ACTION
After reading the iOFFICE blog and numerous positive customer reviews, the facility manager identified iOFFICE as the top choice. She appreciated the intuitive interface and the user-friendliness of the platform.
The engineering company decided to move forward with iOFFICE’s Space Management, Move Management, Service Request and Asset Management modules.
IMPLEMENTATION – U.S.
- With the Space Management and Move Management modules, the facility manager and her team visualize floor plans online, make moves in minutes and plan for future requests.
- The Asset Management module stores all the information on the office’s assets in one place, including gym equipment, printers and more.
- The Service Request module helps accelerate the processing of work orders and ensures each workspace is well-maintained.
- iOFFICE’s mobile app notifications keep the team updated in real time when issues arise. Employees also can submit requests via the mobile app to further streamline the process.
IMPLEMENTATION – Europe
The best example of implementation of iOFFICE comes from one of the engineering company’s offices in Europe. This location has two buildings:
- 90,225 square feet of workspace (nine office floors and one utility floor), supporting almost 1,500 employees
- 300-space parking garage
Before using iOFFICE, the office lacked accurate data since the FM team relied heavily on email to correspond between HR and IT to set up and move employees around the space. This led to a high rate of inefficient moves from space to space, and from office to project sites.
The European location also had a large number of clients with diverse needs, and communications challenges led to bottlenecks in its onboarding and offboarding processes. Using its previous provider, Planon, this office had to rely on inaccurate utilization data, which made reporting and planning difficult.
When the European office selected iOFFICE in April 2015, they decided the best way to effectively implement the solution was to assign one dedicated person to manage it. After designating an iOFFICE specialist, this location selected the Space Management, Move Management, Service Request, Visitor Management and Asset Management modules.
- Within the first week of using iOFFICE, a customized form in the Move Management module was created to manage new hires and employee terminations. The specialist collaborated with HR to create a process that automatically correlates employee data—including name, title, department and employee number—with the week of their hire or termination. HR then passes the service ticket to the IT department to add new fields such as email addresses, phone numbers and computer asset numbers. Previously, the specialist had to find this information by digging through dozens, if not hundreds of emails. Now all that is required by the FM team is to make employee badges.
- The mobile component of iOFFICE has been crucial to the team. The facilities team shares inbound requests and photos via the app on their smartphones to fulfill new requests without having to return to the FM office, which has been a huge timesaver.
- The company accesses pre-established utilization reports [X sq feet/X employees = $ cost per sq. foot.] This planning helps the FM team “measure” a building, according to the standards in each country.
