After a hectic 2020, getting back to the office or visiting new places might seem like a challenge. Following a long period of confinement and lockdowns, businesses must find new ways to adapt to the next normal.
Although remote work is convenient and increases productivity for some, the truth is that empty seats at the office also represent extra expenses for a company. However, before employees can return to the office, and before people once again can start to travel, visit shops, and even attend different activities such as sports events, concerts, and theater functions, safety must be ensured. With MapsIndoors, buildings, and venues can be optimized and enhanced by creating safe and efficient spaces.
In this blog, we present five ways in which an indoor navigation platform can enhance the safety and efficiency of your building.
#1 Hybrid working
Last year, we had to get used to especially one thing: Working remotely. A study conducted at the end of 2020 showed that 55% of 1,200 surveyed workers would prefer working from home at least three times a week after the pandemic. This is something that companies should take into consideration when planning to optimize their offices for their employees’ return.
Adopting a hybrid work model can be a way to optimize the office space and eliminate unused space from employees who don’t work from the office every day. Instead of employees having fixed working stations in the office, companies can introduce flexible seating. With MapsIndoors, employees can easily locate an available working station and book it directly via the map. During these times of social distancing, it’s possible to customize the map to only open up a certain amount of working stations in specific areas of the office, ensuring a safe distance between employees.
#2 Time optimization
In addition to the challenges of hybrid working, one of the main issues with complex and large infrastructures is that people tend to easily get lost in them. Employees, for instance, oftentimes need to spend valuable working time finding ways of getting from one place to another. MapsIndoors can guide them through customizable, interactive, and detailed maps that allow them to quickly find areas such as meeting and printing rooms, public restrooms, cafeterias, and so on.
Moreover, efficiently finding a needed location could improve the overall customer experience. In sports events, for example, this means that spectators spend less time trying to navigate the area and have more time to truly enjoy the occasion. For hotels and airports, easily locating shops or restaurants potentializes customer flow to such places, which positively impacts sales. In this way, time optimization could also be positively reflected in business revenues.
#3 Maximize the use of resources
With live data integrations, MapsIndoors can help users identify large queues and choose a nearby alternative in order to avoid crowds. In turn, this also allows management to for instance deploy more staff to a certain area.
This also benefits facility and cleaning management, as it becomes possible to track how many people have been using the same spaces within a certain amount of time. For convenience, people tend to use similar, known places (like public restrooms) while visiting a particular location. With integrable systems, the MapsIndoors platform can send cleaning management notifications when the number of visitors in a restroom reaches a certain amount and that way ensures consistent and optimized cleaning of the facility.
#4 Easy booking of meeting rooms
As we all know, despite our best attempts to provide the best organization possible, unexpected changes in the booking of seats, rooms, and tables are a relatively common (and rather time-consuming) problem. With dynamic integrations - live data integrations - MapsIndoors can provide users updates with real-time data that is shown on the map such as the number of people in meeting rooms, current temperature, and availability of the rooms. You can integrate MapsIndoors with almost any third-party data system allowing users to make informed decisions when looking for rooms for meetings and conferences - directly via the map.
#5 Assist facility management
One of the main challenges that buildings will face in the near future is ensuring people keep the recommended social distance. With indoor navigation, this is made possible by preventing large gatherings in restricted spaces.
Additionally, MapsIndoors allows facility managers to create profile-based routing, meaning that it’s possible to control which users get access to certain areas. In larger venues such as hospitals or airports, this offers the possibility for staff to be navigated through other, possibly quicker routes than visitors. The ability to limit visitors’ navigation options further makes it possible for management to control and avoid users entering areas that are undergoing renovation or other spaces where safety might become at risk.
If you want to know more about how to boost your building’s efficiency with indoor navigation, please reach out to one of our experts or follow the link down below to book a demo with us.
February 22, 2021
