Category: Business

At corporations and universities across the country, you can still find facility managers making space utilization decisions manually. That is, they are relying on clipboards and clickers, and often commission third-party reports on space occupancy and utilization. 

Facilities and Operations Managers are driving towards informed, fact-based decisions and looking for research conducted at their site to help determine how to reopen offices, libraries and laboratories after the COVID-19 shut down. There’s a growing realization that spaces should be designed with greater flexibility. 

This leaves them with an interesting choice: invest in one-time studies (which can cost up to $250k or greater depending on footprint and duration) through clicker-counting, or invest in a larger technology-driven space analysis. Either approach can identify target areas for improving utilization, benefit employee satisfaction and productivity, and result in significant real estate cost savings. 

Here’s a look into the pros and cons of clicker data studies vs technology-driven space analytics to help you decide which approach can help you achieve your goals for utilization or redesign. 

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM CLICKER STUDIES 

Every third-party clicker partner will work with you to set standards around tracking frequency, observable spaces, duration of study, and expected outcomes. They are ideal for understanding top-level space utilization around how your conference rooms, private offices, or desk spaces are utilized. This may shed light on where you need to increase collaborative spaces, what departments are prime for transitioning to a hot-desking strategy, and the average number of people in a meeting room. 

Studies can surface “signs of life” data, meaning that someone was in conference room A on floor 3 once on Tuesday and never again. They can tell you that, on average, huddle spaces are utilized at X% during core business hours. These are essentially bed checks, telling you that someone was in the space during working business hours. This static snapshot of your conference rooms and office spaces can provide an essential window into how your space is being utilized. 

As with anything, this approach has a few hang-ups. These studies are manual and become quickly outdated. For example, a clicker-study pre-COVID became irrelevant over the last year and a half and will have to be repeated any time policies or employee preferences change. 

Experts in workplace design agree that manual counts lack the precision required to meet the transformational needs of today’s office space. Workplace Design Magazine points to meeting fatigue encouraging workers to be on the move on average every 45 minutes, meaning that once an hour checks can miss key utilization insights. Bringing people into the equation will leave room for some human error as well as disrupting the normal flow of your employee’s workday. The clicker-counter becomes the elephant in the room. This can cause your employees to skew your data, feeling bound to their seats. Not to mention there’s a seasonality to office attendance that might cause clicker study data to be time-bound and require repeat studies.

Finally, because the data isn’t connected to other types of data, for example meeting room scheduling tools, what you have is occupancy counts without context. That context becomes a driver in terms of what to change in order to maximize your space.

WHAT TO EXPECT FROM AI-DRIVEN SPACE ANALYTICS SOFTWARE 

There are a number of automated ways to source people-counting data. From sensors to Wi-Fi, video, and RFID cards, the greater number of channels through which you can capture traffic flow within your space, the more accurate your picture becomes. This data, when surfaced through dashboards, and alerts can bring your space analytics into sharp focus without disrupting the productivity of your workers.  

With a continual source of data, you can look for patterns over weeks, months, and even years. If your redesign team can see shifts from historical data, they can design with transformational flexibility in mind, building in elements like movable partitions, retracting roofs, or shady trees. 

Moreover, data can be overlaid on a spatial representation of your space, giving you a bird’s eye view of your campus. This view allows you to better visualize and create a full picture of how your building, floor, or office space is being used over time. It can help you understand bottlenecks or popular egresses. Are people congregating in the hall between meetings waiting for a room to become available? How can you transform that popular loitering space to better serve employee needs? A full-venue view can uncover these areas for optimization. 

This means making predictions is simpler—the guesswork is taken out with predictive modeling. Machine learning is able to become more effective the more data it has, and it can help predict things like whether a new lease will be utilized to capacity. 

AI SOFTWARE COST: LESS THAN MOST CLICKER-STUDIES 

Some occupancy counting and space analytics software require extensive sensor installations while others don’t. The initial deployment of software-only solutions to capture real-time data and make predictions (without big CapEx investments) often are far lower cost than clicker studies commissioned from third parties for a large campus or venue space. For example, one large corporation exploring space utilization solutions this year reported spending $250k twice annually for 2-week clicker studies—paying more for 4-weeks of data than the annual license fee for software! 

AI software-only solutions can be optimized regularly, allowing you to adjust the granularity of data you’re capturing. The continuous nature of data capture and storage provides for historical analysis which feeds occupancy predictions. Overwhelmingly they surface more actionable, accurate data than a manual occupancy counting service. 

Regardless of how you source data to modernize your workspace, designing a complex, flexible workspace that inspires and engages your employees is the key to unlocking productivity, maximizing real estate ROI and planning for the future of your business.

Look for a vendor like Armored Things whose powerful machine learning platform surfaces anonymized data that your team can take action upon right away. Because we ingest data from a multitude of existing sources and connect to scheduling applications and other business driving tools, we’re able to give you a contextualized, comprehensive view of your space 365 days a year. Your venue, campus, or office is likely already set up to surface data around its usage and Armored Things can help you tap into these existing sources without heavy financial and implementation burdens. 

With higher education back on campus and employees returning (slowly) to offices and corporate campuses, we can look forward to a lot more human interaction. How much exactly remains to be seen though. How long will ‘hybrid” operations continue? Is contactless everything necessary? How cautious will people be returning to indoor spaces for extended periods?

For facilities and operations management professionals, the return of larger groups of people creates a whole new set of challenges related to crowd density and sanitation. And addressing them requires a lot more than counting people going in and out of the building. That’s a good start, but meeting expectations for space utilization will require more. They will also need to understand how people are moving about in and around the building to ensure safety and compliance. 

USE DATA TO INFORM SPACE MANAGEMENT

They say seeing is believing. Imagine a bird’s eye view of your building space with zoomed-in views of floor maps, and alerts and occupancy heatmaps to track overall crowd flow now and over time. This type of “crowd intelligence” can alert personnel to capacity issues, whether a space is getting too crowded, or an entire floor is at capacity. Knowing that a hotspot is forming is extremely powerful for facilities staff. Likewise, leveraging existing historical foot traffic in different spaces can inform space optimization and utilization strategies for the future. Looking back on how crowds move and evolve over time can help optimize staff: how much is needed and when. Sanitation schedules become smarter after seeing typical flow throughout a building, and security schedules can be more efficient after reviewing space use for events on the calendar. This intelligence can also help rethink corporate real estate usage, inform down-sizing or subletting decisions, and potentially save millions of dollars in building rental fees. 

Spatial representation of your entire venue is the best way to bring density metrics to life and get the most out of your space. It changes the narrative from what we think we know to what we actually know. It can come with surprises, too. For example, finding out that students are more likely to hit the library at 3 a.m. instead of 3 p.m., or that a weekly meeting has been drawing more people than the space allows. Actionable intelligence of this sort can alleviate resource-strapped teams, prove space optimization strategies, and enable low-involvement monitoring and easy incident response.  

And don’t be fooled into thinking that the challenges of crowds expire with COVID. The way we understand crowds and the decisions we make based on them is simply going to become more complex over time. 

The crowd intelligence enabled by spatial presentation provides a better understanding of how people are interacting with building spaces and moving through them. It provides actionable intelligence like real-time alerts for overcrowding and can predict traffic flow patterns at future dates based on historical data. It can also be deployed leveraging the existing security infrastructure already in place in most buildings today.

Facilities and operations managers and their partners in IT need the right tools to ensure safe and compliant use of buildings in the new normal. Spatial presentation and crowd intelligence can take the guesswork out of their decision-making and ensure a better and safer experience for all involved. 

About the Author

Ben Patterson is Senior Director of Engineering at Armored Things.

This summer several high-end tech companies – Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter to name a few – have pushed back their return to office dates, or paused until further notice. Google, one of the first companies to completely pull their employees from the workplace at the start of COVID, is pushing their return back to January 2022.

According to the Wall Street Journal, nearly 14% of 400 U.S. employers surveyed in late July and early August said they would or already do require all staff to be vaccinated in order to work in person. Mary Kay O’Neill, a partner in Mercer’s health business, told the Journal, “a number of companies who have taken a conservative line on this may feel that it’s time that they can make the mandate”.

Major tech companies aren’t the only ones suffering delays, as return-to-office plans continue to change with the spread of the Delta variant. Now, CIOs, Facilities Managers, and Corporate Realtors are left to figure out how to get back on track, even as new restrictions are coming down that vary from state to state. 

4 OFFICE RETURN TIPS

Armored Things is encouraging customers to focus on four areas of concentration for designing and understanding their new corporate reopening strategies. 

1. Space optimization. Optimizing your workplace should be an immediate priority for facility managers, who should continue to familiarize themselves with space management terminology. Physically, incorporating a new layout strategy to minimize close contact and make the most of new employee schedules will help things flow more smoothly. Evaluating underutilized spaces will help optimise the workplace from an efficiency standpoint. 
2. Reporting. It would be hard to deliver on the top priority-optimization without being able to see results and reports quickly. The ability to surface critical data will inform space redesign in the workplace. Real-time data can be viewed in historical context for help identifying trouble spots and making informed decisions when it comes to assessing and redesigning the workplace.
3. New Leasing Goals. Informed leasing decisions should also be an area of focus; using data, facility managers should consider the type and amount of real estate required by their company both at this point in time, and for the future.
4. Crowd analysis. Finally, we strongly encourage customers to remember the power of knowing the number of people in offices and on campuses at any one time. Knowing how many people are using different spaces in real time can help manage overcrowding and minimize risk. 

To learn more about how Armored Things helps facilities teams deliver on priorities like this, schedule time with one of our experts today.

Armored Things uses AI and machine learning to manage crowds, foot traffic, and wait times throughout professional sports venues, higher education institutions, and corporate campuses.

Your favorite sports stadium may just be reopening to capacity this summer and fall after a long break, but that doesn’t mean stadium technology advancements were stalled.

Despite a lack of fans in stadiums over the last year, plenty of advancements have been made, bringing cutting-edge technology to venues across the country and around the world. At Armored Things, we have the privilege of supporting premier venues such as the Cleveland Cavaliers Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse and LAFC’s Banc of California Stadium with AI for strategic space utilization decisions and we stay close to the latest innovations. 

Here’s our list of the top 5 initiatives paving the way for an enhanced fan experience in stadiums now.

5G

5G is currently being incorporated in over 6o stadiums and arenas across the United States. In May of this year, Verizon announced a deal that would deploy 5G Ultra Wideband in 15 NBA stadiums, continuing to bridge the gap between fans and the on-court action. Even if we haven’t noticed it yet, 5G has already begun to transform the way we watch and play sports. With unparalleled speeds and ultra-low latency, 5G enables a new kind of network that is designed to connect virtually everyone and everything together including machines, objects, and devices.

At the World Football Summit, Michael Sutherland, chief transformation officer at Real Madrid, emphasized the importance of the technology within the context of sports branding,

“5G brings up an entirely new world of communication. It means a chance of providing richer content and gathering more precise information. As a consequence, consumer expectations are going to evolve. In the long term, 5G will completely change the fans’ expectations regarding their interactions with sports brands.”

Among the NBA stadiums partnered with Verizon is the Cav’s Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse, where fans can point their phone at any player on the floor and get live stats and real-time information- all made possible through 5G. The hyper-quick network speed has also helped enhance the quality of ShotTracker, a Verizon application. ShotTracker – currently in testing beta in practice facilities –  will allow broadcasters, teams, and potential fans to track the basketball like never before. The technology should allow the tracking of ball movement, shot selection, and player efficiency,  providing in-game statistics that were previously near-impossible to register. 

NEIGHBORHOOD EXPERIENCE

One of the benefits of building a new stadium is the economic return it promises for the city. Building a new stadium should allow nearby businesses to thrive, and would open a bevy of new jobs for the public. The Milwaukee Bucks have introduced an initiative that does just that and more. Built in 2018, the Fiserv Forum, the home of the Bucks, is a multi-purpose stadium located in downtown Milwaukee. The unveiling of the new stadium celebrates the development of 30 acres surrounding the arena, 30 acres which includes the ever-growing Entertainment Block. The introduction of this new stadium experience has come in unison with a surge in popularity for the area. Peter Feigin, the team president, told the Atlantic,

“Not only does the time period get extended on the front end, but we are seeing lingering post event, whether the Bucks, Marquette or concerts, with hundreds of people staying in the district for an hour-plus afterward. It is just what strategically we wanted, to make the district sticky with folks.”

The Bucks have had a direct hand in the development of the area, and have consequently seen economic and social success because of it. The Milwaukee model should provide a strong blueprint for other small market organizations to follow, helping bridge the gap between less desirable markets and larger markets. 

CASHLESS EXPERIENCE

Waiting in lines for tickets and concessions can be one of the most tiring, tedious activities for fans. They go to a game to watch, not to wait.

Among the first venues to go cashless was Tropicana Field, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays. Throughout the 2019 MLB season, the stadium elected for this cashless approach. Bill Walsh, Ray’s Vice President of Strategy and Development, told the New York Business Journal that the switch was met with an overall positive response from the fans. 

“Cash-free transactions are faster. Certainly, there are other benefits in terms of greater efficiencies, limiting cash-room activity at night and making operations run a lot more efficiently. Primarily, the fan experience was the driver.”

Banc of California Stadium, the home of Los Angeles FC, is another venue that truly embraced a cashless fan experience. In 2021, the stadium no longer accepted cash, instead opting for pre-ordered concessions and contactless payment options. 

TRANSFORMATIONAL PITCHES

Transformational pitches offer multisport versatility to stadiums.

In 2005, the NFL played its first official game outside of the US in the Estadio Azteca in New Mexico, Mexico. The game marked a historical moment for the sport, which had otherwise played solely in the US for over a hundred years. Estadio Azteca, however, isn’t the only international stadium to host an NFL game. As of 2007, a handful of games each season have been played in England. As of 2019,  games have been played in the Tottenham Stadium – the home of premier league outfit Tottenham Hotspurs – in northeastern central London. According to Populous, the architecture firm behind the brand new stadium, 

“The multi-award-winning Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is a new benchmark in global stadium design, offering one of the finest spectator experiences in the world and, by incorporating a fully retractable pitch, becoming the first purpose-built home for the NFL in Europe.”

From a stadium design perspective, transformational pitches have the potential to revolutionize venue layouts. Tottenham stadium was designed to host both soccer and football, as the grass field used for soccer easily retracts revealing the artificial NFL turf below. The stands, which are also adjustable, allows for optimal viewing and sidelines depending on the sport being played.

AI AND VIRTUAL REALITY

Now more than ever, especially in a post-Covid world, team owners and designers are exploring ways in which fans at home can truly feel immersed in the live-action no matter where they sit. The recent advancements in AI and virtual reality have led to the possibility of stadiums delivering game-day experiences to fans who are watching from their couch. Some organizations including the Minnesota Vikings and Manchester City are already experimenting with VR broadcasts.  These VR broadcasts allow for users to watch the game through a selection of different camera angles such as courtside, on-field action, and even VIP suites. Using Oculus headsets and through a range of applications, fans have access to in-game angles, valuable statistics, and player insights those present in the stadium don’t have access to. In 2021, virtual reality headsets can cost anywhere from $200 up to $1000. Nonetheless, as the technology continues to develop, cheaper alternatives will be able to deliver the same if not better game experiences for fans.  

Armored Things uses AI and machine learning to manage crowds, foot traffic, and wait times throughout professional sports venues, higher education institutions, and corporate campuses. To learn more about Armored Things, check out our Solution Overview Video or connect with our Sales Team at Sales@ArmoredThings.com.

Workplace distancing. Crowd density. Occupancy, vacancy, capacity.  Welcome to the new language of reopening campuses and venues around the globe.

Whether it’s pro sports venues, college stadiums, campus libraries or office buildings, dedicated reopen task forces are hard at work understanding new requirements to count people, predict crowd behavior, and help students, fans and employees return safely.

At the same time, CIOs say this is a very noisy time—they are hearing lots of pitches from lots of vendors who want to help them reopen safely. Evaluating AI-powered reopen software can be daunting, even though there are some obvious starting points. It should have proven partnerships in your vertical. It should scale easily, and ideally be vendor agnostic, working with any IT provider you currently have on premises.

But what else should you know about this category of crowd intelligence software? We’ve highlighted 6 key attributes here:

1. Ask before investing in sensors. Ask whether the solution requires sensors to be installed over doorways or other locations. Depending on your electrical supply options, and the procedures for replacing batteries, some sensors could potentially become a hassle.  Inquire whether the solution can leverage existing video systems you already have in place.
2. Remote Deploy. Considering how hard it is to schedule meetings and visitors these days, this might seem like an obvious starting point. If you believe your SaaS provider can get you up and running remotely, it may take some of the initial strain off the project.
3. Privacy. Most organizations do not want to be in the surveillance business. When looking for software that helps you count people and predict how and when they will use spaces – think library during finals week or holiday shopping at the mall – look for a solution that provides you visual representations of people in your space. Ask your SaaS provider if the data they wrangle and you see is anonymous.
4. A display you love. Everyone will tell you their software has the most intuitive interface. That’s because the user experience is important—but not because it makes you feel happier and smarter when you see it (though that’s nice) but because every other person in your organization should feel empowered by it. Non-technical types should find it easy to use and understand.  So yes, there’s a lot of GUI hype—but for good reason.
5. Alerting. Make sure you have the ability to surface anomalies in ways that make sense to your team in the command center, or the ones using mobile devices. These threshold alerts can help facility and security teams respond to incidents faster, avoid bottlenecks or overcrowding, and adjust staffing when necessary.
6. Compliance. When evaluating reopen software, ask providers whether you will be able to review data for compliance purposes. So much time and effort will be dedicated to phased reopening; make sure you are able to review and show data that makes clear how people use the space you manage, and how your reopen plan is working.