Easier, faster, more responsive occupancy planning for our “new normal”

As workers return to the office, occupancy planners will be facing a more demanding "new normal,” with new occupancy plans required each time workspace capacity and worker return rates change. With Core Planning, planners can change these projects from overwhelming and time-consuming to easy, fast and responsive.

With our “new normal,” occupancy planning will be taking on increasing importance. Workers are returning to the office to be with their colleagues.  They need to be located on the same floor, not waiting for elevators with limited capacity or climbing flights of stairs. At the same time, planners’ workload will be, or already is, increasing.  Most facilities will need new plans to reflect reduced floor capacities and different worker return rates for different business groups.  If workers return in two-day shifts, that will mean two sets of new plans. Then, as business needs and floor capacities change, new plans will be needed, again.

Core Planning transforms what has typically been a tedious, manual trial-fit occupancy planning process by applying proven techniques from other disciplines such as flight scheduling, inventory management and logistics. Imagine how much worse our flying experiences would be if flight schedulers still used manual spreadsheet and drag-and-drop approaches.

With Core Planning, planners can combine their insights and expertise with data-driven analytics to find the best solutions in minutes, not the hours and days needed for manual approaches. Here’s one example for an organization with eleven business groups located across thirteen floors. New plans were needed to reflect reduced floor capacity and business group workers return rates ranging from 20% to 70%. With Core Planning we were able to develop the “post-Covid” plan in just a few minutes, improving business group adjacencies and vacating two floors.

Once data are entered, with automatic imports or manually for small projects, planners specify business group requirements, including adjacencies, growth and consolidation, and specific resource and space-type needs. Then Core Planning’s algorithms automate the trial-fit search through all of the possible ways to locate business groups on floors and in buildings to find the solutions that best meet those business needs. Planners can easily and quickly change assumptions or revise requirements to incorporate their insights and new information from business leaders to find better plans, enabling planners to be more responsive to business needs.

With Core Planning, planners are using their time for what only they can do, working with business leaders and adding their insights from years of experience, letting software automate tedious tasks.