Read this article about VMware, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Value Creation or Innovation Execution Project, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

VMware India has 5,000+ employees with expectation to grow at double digit percentage in FY19. Real Estate Office space expansion is lagging the workforce growth, thus resulting in lack of dedicated seats for appreciable proportion of workforce. To address this problem an innovative solution was developed and implemented to optimize the use of existing workspace by identifying free space when an employee is out-of-office and have it available for the work force without assigned seat, thereby reducing the need for more touch down spaces. In addition to avoiding substantial capital expenditure, it is also to align with our company’s goal to achieve and maintain carbon neutrality. The solution had a successful pilot run in one team and is being rolled out across multiple teams in India. It has potential to avoid expenses of $ 1.2 million dollars for entire India site.

The solution design is aimed to:

• Increase the existing Seat Utilization
• Avoid cost by foregoing procurement of additional real estate space.
• Avoid indirect expenses on energy and miscellaneous cost (electricity for air-conditioning, lighting, housekeeping, security, etc.)
  

It has been observed that a significant percentage of the existing seats remain unoccupied everyday due to employees being Out-of-Office for various reason such as planned leave, sick leave, work from home, on travel etc. The Seat Finder Solution helps to optimize the utilization of the unoccupied seats by discovering and publishing the information using Microsoft Flow ( cloud-based Process automation tool) to the workforce who do not have a assigned seat. This increases the utilization of otherwise unoccupied seats.

 As part of developing this solution a best practice of all employees sending Out-of-Office meeting invites to their Managers, was implemented through a change management approach. This also brought in a good team hygiene where the manager is always informed and has visibility to employee’s availability in office.

The solution has been deployed in 2 teams with total allocated 40 seats. Results has showed average 80% utilization of office space. Upon deployment of this solution, the problem of short-term workplace shortages was addressed without adding extra capacity. The overall employee adoption of the solution has received positive feedback.

This led to a cost avoidance of approximately $9,600 for a team size of 40. The solution is currently being rolled out to a business group of 500 employees which will translate to a cost avoidance of $120,000. The time to implement the solution to a new team was about 8 hours and existing Enterprise Microsoft license available to employees used for solution.

This solution eliminated the risk of undergoing interruptions in operations and customer service posed due to traditional way of rearranging seats to rationalize per team’s requirement.

It also eliminated any capital expenditure in addition of extra workspace capacity (instead used the existing capacity to its fullest) which would have not only required long-range planning, had long lead times but also would have had detrimental effects on the environment.

Team Member Names

Thomas George
Atanu Mandal
Arijit Roy
Prabhu N
Ramesht Shrivastav
Nishith Sahu