As featured in FM World, 22nd April 2010.
When it comes to cutting costs across the workplace, room booking is often overlooked but, as Guy Moody discovers, trends in meeting room management are rapidly changing as businesses attempt to drive down costs.
The article includes a case study of BNY Mellon:
Recently voted the Safest Bank in the US BNY Mellon is a global financial services company employing approximately 8,000 staff within the UK and Ireland alone.
BNY Mellon recently relocated their UK headquarters to Queen Victoria Street in Blackfriars, London. The building contains a significant number of meeting and conference rooms and it is the responsibility of BNY Mellon’s facilities department to ensure that the rooms are used to their full potential. According to facilities manager Chris King, “All meeting rooms had previously been booked via our facilities helpdesk which was a considerable administrative load. We wanted to ensure that the new building was run as efficiently as possible, and we needed a system that was flexible enough to cope with our demands.”
Each room had to be assigned a “permission level” to ensure that it could only be booked by the appropriate level of employee. In addition, BNY Mellon wanted to impose departmental and geographic restrictions to certain facilities.
BNY Mellon implemented Service Works’ QFM Room Bookings, in parallel with a major upgrade of their existing QFM system. A move to the web-based application made the system securely accessible to all European staff, irrespective of their location. Meeting rooms have been configured to conform to one of four differing permission levels, enabling BNY Mellon to flexibly restrict which staff can book shared meeting resources. Configurable layouts can be defined in the system, for example, BNY Mellon’s board room has nine possible layouts. The system also allows for custom reports specific to their business to manage cross charging for catering and other services relating to room bookings.
To read the full article, please click here.