BY VEGARD FLADBY

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Hybrid workspace is now a key part of our daily lives and MazeMap helps plan out our facilities, providing the optimal cost to usage ratio for the necessary resources. To facilitate this paradigm shift into a hybrid day-to-day work life, indoor maps are becoming a staple in many large campuses/corporates, alongside features such as IoT integrations, Room & Desk booking, workplace analytics, etc. 

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Desk Booking Challenges

Well then, how do we optimize the usage of our expensive resources like meeting rooms or desks? We’ve already discussed the topic of meeting room booking, and we know that it works like a charm! Now our goal has been to develop a scalable solution solving the same issues when it comes to booking and administrating desk bookings. “Then what’s the problem” you might ask…

The main challenge is to get people to cancel their bookings if they don’t need them anymore, or don’t show up

This is the main pain point we’re aiming to solve. Having an automatic system for unbooking booked resources around the workplace will help improve the utilization of said resources. 

Another challenge has been to install expensive and time-consuming-to-apply hardware such as sensors at every desk. This would be an expensive solution at set-up, but also labor-intensive to maintain in the long-term due to battery swaps, software upgrades, replacements, etc. 

Solution: Revolutionizing Scalable Desk Booking with Automatic Unbooking

The new way of administrating automatic unbooking of planned desk bookings is through the already existing Wi-Fi infrastructure. Easy as can be, with MazeMap’s Desk Booking with Wi-Fi AutoUnbook. No longer do we rely on expensive sensors to detect whether a bookée has shown up to their desk or not.

Our new addition to Desk Booking, AutoUnbook, runs regularly and creates a list of all bookings that have recently started. We then check if there are recent WiFi events from the user who made the booking. If none are made, we cancel the booked resource, making it available for someone else to use.

Benefits

These are some of the key benefits of having AutoUnbook implemented in your desk booking system: 

• Effectively manage the workspace through an intuitive map
• High scalability for deployment with high cost-savings 
• Optimizes resource usage as un-utilized desks will become free for anyone else to use. 

From this we can see desk booking to be benefical for both the end-user, being employees or visitors, as well as those administrating the facility.

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Return on Investment

Let’s crunch some numbers. The cost of an office is dramatically different depending on location, but some sources suggest that the average cost of a desk could be as high as $18 000 per year (desk usage based on hybrid working). This means that if a desk goes unused 25% of the time, a cost of up to $4500 per desk is going out the window. 

Considering that, for most businesses, rental/mortgage costs are the second-largest costs following wages, most of these companies will have to prepare themselves for this ongoing paradigm shift within the workplace. A 25% waste of your second-largest expense is not something companies want as a recurring cost. 

Summary

We’ve facilitated desk booking for a long time, but now we’ve implemented a smarter, cheaper, and more efficient way of eliminating ghost bookings. Using MazeMap’s new solution Wi-Fi AutoUnbook you’re certain that any desk where the bookée doesn’t show up, is free to use for someone else. This allows for high scalability for deployment with high cost-savings. 

For those interested, we also provide a one-page flyer covering this topic that is easy to download and share.