ROOMZ: Shaping the Future of Office Spaces

Gone are the days when the workplace was merely a space where employees occupied during regular office hours. Digitalisation has blurred the lines between the physical office and virtual workspace, enabling employees to communicate across the organisation and forge productive business relationships in unprecedented ways. That being said, stakeholders of leading organisations are seeking to implement a digital working environment by integrating emerging unified communication technologies that break down communication barriers and transform business operations by fostering efficiency, innovation, and growth. The key to success, however, lies in the effective implementation of a digital workplace strategy capable of driving real cultural change. One company, ROOMZ, has been carving out a niche in delivering easy-to-deploy solutions to support and create the agile work environments of the future.

As workplace demographics continue to shift, employers struggle to meet the dynamic needs of a multi-generational workforce. Often employees go through the time-consuming process of finding a suitable location to conduct meetings with fewer chances of success. A significant part of the problem is 'ghost-meetings,' where office spaces are booked for meetings that fail to occur. This is further reinforced by the fact that the traditional workplace infrastructures lack the tools that leverage data and enable employees to find meeting spaces efficiently.

ROOMZ allows users to manage their office space resources intelligently while saving time and promoting a positive work culture.

The Swiss company's cloud-enabled solution also called 'ROOMZ,' consists of two components, the 'ROOMZ Display, and ROOMZ Sensor.'"We give value to our customers by designing the solution to be easy to install, use and maintain," Fabien Moine, Head of Sales at ROOMZ. The Display enables users to view occupancy data such as reservation state of a room, name of the organiser, the title and duration of the upcoming meetings. By selecting 'Book' and setting the duration on the Display, free rooms will be instantly reserved for meetings. To bridge the information gap and eliminate 'ghost meetings,' the firm has added state-of-the-art sensors as an intelligent supplement to the Display. The ROOMZ Sensors discretely detect the presence of a person using passive infrared detection with patented algorithms for accuracy and compare it with the reservations. In combination with the Display, the Sensors will automatically 'release' the reservation of the rooms for others to book in cases of ghost meetings within fifteen minutes of failure in detecting any employees in the space. Furthermore, the Sensors provide actionable insights to facility managers based on evaluations of effective occupancy of rooms and can be integrated with Office 365, Google Calendar, and other reservation systems. Thus, enabling companies to optimise and enhance the use of meeting spaces.

The ROOMZ product is a perfect example of modern-day Swiss engineering, offering high-end functionality built into a user-friendly design. 'A unique factor is that we offer the combination of Display and Sensor within the same product ecosystem,' states CEO of ROOMZ, Roger Meier. ROOMZ's solution is a full ecosystem, 100 percent wireless and easy to install within minutes using existing Wi-Fi networks.

Besides, similar to a 'flightboard,' users can gain an overview of the occupancy of all meeting rooms through various devices such as t.v, smartphones, tablets, PCs. Focusing on the security aspect, a ROOMZ Display has no operating system. The benefit of it is having a display that needs zero maintenance, as there is no data in it. This is a huge benefit for the security officer evaluating such solutions. Furthermore, the Display is very efficient from a carbon footprint perspective and consumes 10000 times less power than a traditional tablet. This is because the Display is "ON" only two minutes a day, customers can expect having the Display up and running for many years. To illustrate the efficacy of ROOMZ, Meier narrates an incident where a prominent IT service provider, isolutions approached them for assistance. isolutions sought a display for room reservations that meets the company's technical and aesthetic requirements for a smart work environment. Through swift installation process and cloud-scalability, isolutions was able to ease administration woes and connect to existing reservation systems. The preconfigured and self-explanatory Displays with the minimalist design, and smart sensors were well received by the employees.

Moving on in the future, ROOMZ will soon introduce a professional service that will allow customers to manage all workspaces such as shared desks, huddle rooms, and meeting rooms efficiently. One part of the system will be to help employees to find a space available in the building. The other part will be to give the real use of all spaces to help ROOMZ's customers to modify their workspace strategy over time. In addition, to offer an in-depth demonstration of ROOMZ solution, the company has recently launched a new campaign called 'Experience ROOMZ,' where customers can test all of its products by purchasing the 'Experience ROOMZ BOX.' The firm garnered more than 400 satisfied customers in Switzerland, Germany, and France with expansion plans for new regions like England, Italy, Spain, and Portugal for 2020.