AN iOFFICE
FOUNDED1946
AREAS SERVEDNationwide
WEBSITE ufginsurance.com
INDUSTRYInsurance
SPACE8 U.S. office buildings
HEADQUARTERSCedar Rapids, Iowa
Founded in 1946, UFG offers insurance protection for businesses. Its most recent acquisition of Mercer Insurance Group in 2011 expanded its insurance operations to the East and West Coast regions. UFG employs more than 1,100 individuals across six locations in the U.S. with office buildings in Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, New Jersey, and two in California. UFG is a publicly traded firm.
A benefit we later realized was that with accurate square footage of each department we could easily track and charge back costs to specific departments.”
UFG needed a way to track use of meeting rooms and desks, while also helping employees find their coworkers efficiently.
UFG chose iOFFICE after an RFP process because it provided the capability and insights needed to manage hundreds of employees, desks, and spaces in eight locations.
UFG originally implemented iOFFICE to support move management and seating allocations, but found significant value in data insights and the Hummingbird app.
With the success of the initial implementation, UFG is deploying the iOFFICE solution in four additional buildings in 2020.
In the past, employees could move at their discretion and were responsible for updating the FM team of any such moves. The FM team then had to spend time manually changing floor plans or finding an employee’s new desk since staff occasionally forgot to notify the FM team. Now employees submit move requests to the FM team directly via the Hummingbird app. From the iOFFICE platform, the facilities team can view all employee move requests and locate free desks for placement.
UFG employees across the eight office buildings now use the iOFFICE Hummingbird mobile app to find coworkers and meeting rooms with ease. When new employees join UFG, they are automatically enrolled in the iOFFICE platform and allocated a desk within their department. The new hires can then use the Hummingbird app to navigate the office and find coworkers and other departments. Mailroom staff can easily locate recipients even those who have recently moved desks.
“Before iOFFICE, new hires didn’t know where each department was or what floor to go to, and employees struggled to find conference rooms and coworkers. With the Hummingbird app by iOFFICE, employees can easily locate and get directions to a meeting room, department or specific coworker.”
Prior to working with iOFFICE, UFG struggled to manage the parking lot at its headquarters. With more employees than there are parking spaces, allocations are based on how long an employee has been at the company. To complicate monitoring, out-of-office employees lent their parking spots to coworkers.
The management team had to scan through hours of security footage to see who parked in each space and verify it was allocated to that employee. Rolling out iOFFICE has harmonized the approach to parking management and has provided UFG management with a simplified parking spot allocation and monitoring process. The iOFFICE platform stores employee information such as parking spot number, car model and license plate, making it easy to verify if employees are parked in the correct spot. Out-of-office employees can now notify management, via the Hummingbird app, which coworker will be using their space.
The space management solution from iOFFICE has allowed UFG to more accurately measure the square footage taken up by each department in the building. The UFG finance department uses this measurement to calculate departmental chargebacks. While this was not UFG's original purpose in implementing the solution, it has introduced a welcome efficiency to this process.