Move management software will keep your data fresh and streamline the moves, adds, changes (MAC) process. Learn how to enhance communication by refining your move management process. You will learn:
- Best practices for streamlining a move, add, change (MAC) workflow process
- Time-saving move management tips in Wisp, including automated communications
- How to leverage key roles and add transparency to gain efficiencies
- Methods for eliminating redundancy and duplicate entries
- Change management tips for process improvements and gaining buy-in
Move Management Process Presenters:
Transcript of the move management webinar:
Christi Van Maanen (Moderator)
Slide 1: Intro
Hello everyone and welcome to the webinar. We are thrilled to have so many of you join us on this call wanting to learn more something that we here are very passionate about – Best practices to keep data accurate.
Slide 2: Photos
My name is Christi Van Maanen and I’m a studio director at Gensler and your moderator today. I’ve been with the firm for just over 13 years, and as I scan the attendees list, I recognize many names that I have had the pleasure of speaking and working with over the years. Some of you have been a Wisp user for many years and for others, Wisp is going to be new for you. To level set just a bit—Wisp is a web-based solution and service that Gensler provides to help organizations manage their space and occupancy. We feel strongly that to do this successfully really depends on the processes in place to manage both your supply and demand data. Today we are focusing on keeping that demand data (or people data) accurate, and we’ve right-sized the content to talk about general practices that can apply to organizations of all sizes and industries. Last December, we asked you to vote on several topics you would want to learn more about, and there was an overwhelming response that you wanted to hear more about best practices for occupancy management. We will be addressing the logistics of implementing a streamlined move management process and how to communicate that process within your organization using an effective change management plan.
Slide 3: Life Cycle
Consider the real estate life cycle. There’s so much focus on projects during the strategize/plan, the design/solve, the construct/implement phases that the manage track phase is often forgotten or at best updates lag behind. By tracking your supply and demand as it changes, you can react to business demands much more quickly. You have accurate data at your fingertips, you get invited to the decision-making table, you can be proactive with the information that is gleaned, you create transparency among groups and you can move into the strategize and plan phase much more quickly— all starts with a well thought out office move management process.
Slide 4: Churn
Managing churn is no small task. Move management is really all about managing churn. Churn is what measures the number of times somebody moves from one seat to another. This is also known as your box moves and they’re often in response to a business need such as reorganization, could be growth or staff reduction, as well as transfers that you have to keep in mind. On average, we know that our Wisp clients experienced 49% churn in 2017, and that tells us that half of all the occupants or employees moved at least one-time last year. Now think of how many employees you have within your own organizations and how much activity that is to track. It’s no secret that the times have changed and technology has made it even easier for people to get up and move themselves. Some of you may even be a victim to the what we like to call the “midnight move”, where people get up and move without telling anyone. And if I could see you all right now, and ask you to raise your hands if you’ve seen this within your own organization, I’d probably see a lot of hands. These are the type of activities that make it easy for occupancy data (or again that demand data) to get outdated quickly. It’s also an opportunity to create that process to support data governance, strengthen that communication and then of course add value through accurate real estate metrics.
Slide 5: Intros
Like those of you who voted on the topics, we too feel strongly about this and I have two experts that I want to introduce, who will be sharing some tried and true best practices with you. First we have, Ashley Betthauser. She is a Wisp Implementation Specialist, and provides consultation and advisory services to a number of our Wisp clients during the initial configuration. She also serves as an ongoing resource for questions and support, and she works with her clients to help them mine their space and occupancy data in Wisp to find new insights. I also want to introduce Tom Mulhern. He is a senior strategist, writer, and facilitator, who specializes in change management and helps business leaders and teams discover how to bring clarity to their processes and projects. He has led multi-stage consulting and design strategy projects for many large, global clients. Thank you Tom for joining us on the call today.
Slide 6: Agenda
Today we are going to be focusing on:
- Why mastering your move management process is important
- How the moves, adds, changes (mac) process can be streamlined
- Change management tips to get the process implemented
- A case study about the challenges one client faced and then how those challenges were overcome
- Questions that you have in the audience
Now I’m going to turn it over to Ashley to share more about those best practices for move management.
Ashley Betthauser (Presenter)
Slide 7: Challenges for Maintaining data
As Christi had mentioned, over the years, I’ve implemented numerous clients that are a variety of industries and sizes. So with my experience, I have been able to see firsthand the struggle that a lot of clients have with keeping their data up-to-date and accurate, no matter what method that they’re using. A lot of these struggles come from a variety of challenges, and challenges like:
- How can I avoid dual data entry?
- How do we align communication across departments?
- How do we streamline our process in all offices or all departments?
- How can I keep up as our portfolio continues to grow?
So how do we overcome these challenges? We have a process that we’ve refined over the years that incorporate our best practices to help reduce or eliminate these challenges for clients.
Slide 8: Move Management Process
We’ve identified four steps to improving the office move management process – Understand, Define, Streamline, and Automate.
Slide 9: Understanding the Move Management Process
When a client comes to us with their move management challenges, the first thing we do is get a good understanding of how their move management process works today or how it doesn’t work today. We want to know what is working well and where their pain points are so we can incorporate best practices to streamline and improve it. What we don’t want to do is try to fix something that isn’t broken. Having those initial discussions on what’s working well and what isn’t working well, is critical. And then we map out who the key people are that are involved, how they are involved, and what information is being transferred. If this sounds like an overwhelming task, don’t worry, we will work with you closely to help map out this moves, adds, changes process.
Slide 10: Defining the Moves, Adds, Changes Process
Once the current move management process is mapped out, the next step is to define the process, which includes talking through best practices and key roles. When defining the key roles, there are typically two or three key roles in it. There is the Requester, the Approver and the Completer. The first role is the Requester. These are the people that are closest to the need. They’re the on-the-ground people that know when someone is moving. They’re typically within the line of business, so a department coordinator, department admin, a supervisor or someone of that sort. These people are typically already doing a similar task so it may be easier to tap into them as a resource.
The next role is the Approver. This is an optional role. It really depends on your organization and if you will have an additional person reviewing the requests prior to it moving forward. Some clients opt to have this role, while some clients end up actually opting out of this role. These approvers also have the ability to deny a request if for some reason it can’t move forward. For example, if a request comes to them and maybe that person doesn’t qualify for that space, they’re able to deny that request. The approver is typically a Supervisor, an Office Manager, or a Facilities Manager.
The last key role is the Completer. These are the final eyes prior to it being updated in the system. They, just like the approver, have the ability to deny the request as well. So maybe they go walk the space and see that that space actually isn’t available. They have the ability to deny the request. Typically, this person also oversees all the governance of the process and really helps enforce people are doing it correctly. Companies have different titles for the completer. It could be a Facilities Team, Office Manager, Corporate Real Estate, or Workplace Services. You could have one person per building, or one person per several buildings that are doing the completer role in the move management process.
Slide 11: Define – Fear
When talking through the key roles, a concern that sometimes comes up is about opening up the system for others to use it. Some believe that by opening up the system, it messes up the information. But contrary to this, opening up the system to others actually keeps the data more accurate. It empowers people on the ground to make requests, which helps ensure that as things are happening, the data is getting updated. It also creates transparency throughout the organization and ultimately becomes a proactive approach verse a reactive approach for keeping the data accurate. Also, the governance doesn’t change, there’s still someone that’s reviewing the information prior to it being updated in the system.
Slide 11: Streamline
After we talk through the key roles and define the process, the next thing we want to do is see how we can streamline it. There are four main goals that we try to achieve with streamlining:
- Reduce and eliminate redundancy
- Remove the need for duplicate entries
- Create process and communication consistencies
- Automate it, if possible with move management software
Slide 12: Automate with Move Management Software
Find out if there is anything people are doing manually today that could be automated with move management software. What we don’t want to do is change the process to fit the tools and automation, but instead have the tools and automation fit the process. Some examples of items that we have automated with existing Wisp clients are:
- Data exchanges – A daily human resources feed into the system, which keeps occupant data up-to-date and accurate on a daily basis and can feed into other systems
- E-mail notifications that are triggered to keep all communication streamlined
- Incorporating the Wisp move sheet
- Launching the Space Request Utility as an easy tool for the Requesters to use to submit a move request
Slide 13: How it Works
Now that we’ve talked through the four steps, let’s put it into perspective on how the move process could work. So let’s say that John Brown is moving to a different workstation. The Department Coordinator, Barbara Smith, knows that he’s moving, therefore she wants to send a request over to Frank in Facilities. When looking at these key roles, Barbara Smith would be the Requester. She is the on-the-ground person knowing that John’s moving. And Facilities Frank would be the Completer. He’s receiving the request and ultimately updating the system to reflect those changes. Some of you may know what the Space Request Utility is, but for those who don’t, clients came to us having concern about wanting an easy way for Requesters to simply make a request for someone to move. Based on that feedback, we developed a tool called the Space Request Utility. It was created as an add-on to the Wisp platform, and designed to be a simple three step mechanism to submit a request. Now I’m going to show you a brief demo of how easy it could be for a Requestor to go in and submit a request.
Demo of the Space Request Utility
So let’s say that I am Barbara Smith and I need to submit a request for John for him moving. This is an easy three step process that begins with the Space Request Utility. I’m going to input John Brown’s name to find him to move him. I’m going to apply my search. Bring him over to my working list. And then move onto that next step. So in step two I’m going to enter the details about the request. So I could enter in a Target Date of when John’s going to be moving. Then down below we can also incorporate additional fields to be requested on asking on the move. Let’s say that IT or Facilities or Movers have additional questions that they’re having Barbara do on a different form. Instead we can incorporate them into the Space Request Utility so she’s only needing to go to one spot to fill out all of the information about the request. If I go down, let’s say she does not need assistance with the technology move and she’s moving a printer. Then I click continue and move on to that last step which is selecting a space. So where is John moving to? I’m going to put the building that he is going to be in, then I’m going to input the floor and select that floor plan. The nice thing about having that visual floor plan for the Requesters to be able to see, is that they’re seeing real-time of where people are sitting in their spaces. So they’re being able to see where the open spaces are and maybe were spaces aren’t available instead of having those static .pdfs. If I scroll down, anything that is in yellow I can see as an open station. If I know that John Brown is moving into this station, I can simply just select that space, and then I just click on generate requests. That’s all I need to do if I’m Barbara. So I submitted the request over. At this point, an e-mail can be triggered to Frank in Facilities saying that there is a request in the system for him to review. In that case, if I was Frank, I’d come into Wisp. I’d go into the Pending Request area and down below I’d see that request that Barbara submitted. It’ll tell me all the details about the request – so who’s moving, where he is moving from and where he’s moving to and then down to who submitted the request. I can also click on the request ID to see additional information about the request. I can also export out a move sheet and send it over to the movers. Then ultimately when John moves, I just click on his request and hit complete. At that point, the data has been updated in the system.
So as you can see with this updated process, it streamlines the communication, which helps keep all parties informed and keeps the data accurate. After hearing these best practices about a move management process, you may be thinking, “Great! But I’ll never be able to get the buy-in and support I need to improve my process.” Well, Tom Mulhern is now going to share some change management tips on how to implement process improvement successfully.
Tom Mulhern (Presenter)
Slide 14: Managing Process Change
Thanks, Ashley. If the process is as simple as Ashley just demonstrated, it shouldn’t be that hard for anybody and we can all kind of just go home. But in the real world, we also know that getting people to change anything with doing with their workflow, whether that’s somebody on your team or even yourself or people that you work with, can be a little tougher than that.
Slide 15: Change is Normal
As we go through change processes with our clients, we emphasize a few points. First of all, change is pretty normal and ever more so in our work lives. Also that appetite for change is normally distributed. You may have seen this before as an innovation adoption curve but when we think about change management, we also think about in an organization, people are lined up similar to this. We focus a lot on the beginning of the curve because we know when we can get over the hump, it gets a lot easier to get those people in the right curve, the 16% to pick-up . If we spend all of our time focusing on them early, we miss the opportunity to get the change moving into a positive direction. Sometimes a change is just a matter of exposure to the behavior over time.
Slide 16: Map the Changers
When you think about change in relation to your move, add, change process, it’s important to think about the roles and who is involved in change. Who do you need to implement something like this? Who has to start doing something that they don’t do today? Is that role of the Requester something that’s in somebody’s hands today or is it something that they have to do that they don’t do? Are there people in the move management process who are going to have to stop doing something that they are used to doing and have a little confusion about whether they should keep on doing it? Also think hard about if there are other people depending on your organization, there might be significant other workflows affected. HR workflows or IT workflows for instance. Everyone likes to have support from business leadership. Think about your business leaders in terms of the changes and the communication you want from them in terms of something that they may have to change. They’re going to have to understand that they need to talk about something that they may be normally don’t talk about. Really just start from that audience point of view. What’s the hardest thing that we’re asking from people from their point of view? Often in communication situations people come in and do the messaging first and then only then ask themselves what they’re really asking of the other people.
Slide 17: Stage the Change
The other thing that we like to tell people is over communicate early and often. Engage early with people if you think you’re going to need their support. Try to engage with them before you full have made your decision that you’re going to make the change so that you can understand their situation ahead of time. Do some tests, pilots, dry-runs. Be sure to not stop communicating once the change has begun. And especially to communicate about success stories.
Slide 18: Frame, Don’t Market
We like to think about, instead of thinking about selling any kind of changes as a sales job or a marketing job. Think about it as a framing exercise. You need to be able to let people know, inform them. Just the facts, what is the process change. You don’t need to sell them on it, you just need to explain it. Sometimes we get caught up in why it’s such a good idea that we forget we kind of gloss over what actually needs to change. Some of this is derived from the work we do. People adopt to open offices or free address workplaces. So it may or may not be a dramatic enough change in the case of this move, add, changes to warrant this, but sometimes people have to actually learn a new skill. You may assume they know how to use a tool, say a web-based tool, but every new tool , every piece of software actually does require that people learn how to use it. Some people are really quick on the uptake with the software and others are not as much. Lastly, there is a little bit of selling and inspiration involved. Linking this to organizational changes—maybe a change in values or focus on streamlining processes in your organization for instance—connecting it to something more important that’s happening in an organization level so people can understand the importance of it. Don’t forget to inquire not just inspire. I think we can all spend a little bit of too much time in the communication situation talking and not nearly enough listening.
Slide 19: Recognize and Reward Success
The last point that I’d make is that as you roll something out, try to think appreciatively and recognize and reward the successes instead of imposing penalties or nagging for non-compliance. It’s not just the idea that you can catch more flies with honey sort of thinking, though that’s part of it, it’s also that people are able to hear positive reinforcement. After a while people shut down negative reinforcement, and the eye rolls begin, and the behavior doesn’t change. One thing that your leaders can do for you in a situation where you’re trying to make a big process change, is simply to spotlight and appreciate the people who make the change. Just visibility inside of an organization can be a reward. And as you go forward, again stay positive, but also hold the line. So if people are trying to circumvent a new process, it’s important to keep on patiently showing them how the process works, and recognize that it’s going to take them a little longer than the average. Go back to that change curve I showed you earlier, it may take any given person a little longer than average to adopt a new change.
Slide 20: Quote
Fundamentally we are talking about communication, and this is my guiding light when it comes to any kind of change management is to recognize that just because we think we’ve communicated, we may not have. I’m going to pass it back to Ashley who will tell you a little story that puts both of our parts together, and then we will open it up to questions. So Ashley, all yours.
Ashley Betthauser (Presenter)
Slide 21: Case Study – Challenges
Thanks Tom! So the nice thing about incorporating these improvements for move process and change management is that it doesn’t matter if you’re 30,000 sf or 30 million square feet – incorporating the best practices can pertain to your company. One of our Wisp clients came to us regarding struggling being able to keep names-to-seats updated. With roughly 160 buildings, over 7.5 million SF, and over 40,000 occupants, people were constantly moving but Wisp wasn’t being able to stay updated to reflect those changes. If you can recall earlier, the average churn rate was 49% and the client’s average churn rate last year was 62%, so that’s a lot of people moving. So once they came to us with their concerns, the first thing that we wanted to talk about was the challenges that they were having. These challenges included:
- People filling out manual forms for moves, adds, changes (MAC), in which then was sent to the Site Coordinators who then had to go back and update the system to reflect these changes
- People would also be those ‘Midnight Movers’, where they’d just get up and move therefore walk audits were needed frequently to reflect what these changes were
- The process was different depending on the building
- And there was dual entry and redundancy when moving someone
So we quickly learned that the approach that was in place today was a very reactive approach.
Slide 22: Case Study – Process Improvement
Once we talked through the challenges, we identified who the key roles were for a move. So at that time, the Admins were sending manual forms over to the Site Coordinators about a move. In this case, the Admin would be the Requester, and the Site Coordinator would be the Completer because they’re the ones that were receiving the information and ultimately updating the floor plans to reflect that. They did end up opting out of an Approver role because that additional review process wasn’t needed for them.
Once we identified the key roles, we then identified other forms and communications that are part of the process. So once the new process was mapped out, it looked like they were going to have the Admins use the Space Request Utility to make the request and the Site Coordinator would review the request in Wisp, input a scheduled date, and then export out a move sheet for movers (which used to be a manual process in the past). Then once the move was complete, the Site Coordinator would complete the request in the system.
With this updated process, it has helped ensure that the people that are on the ground have the ability to submit the request. It eliminate the need for dual entry for Requesters and Site Coordinators. With the prior process, the Site Coordinators were needing to input 1,000s of request into the system, which was really redundant when the Admin was filling out a similar form in a different way. It also created consistency with all locations and departments by using the same process. It streamlined the communication with e-mail notifications going out at different points of the process as well. And they used that automated move sheet instead of the manual move sheet. Most importantly, it became a proactive approach to keep the data accurate.
Because of how many locations they have, they decided to opt to do a pilot in part of their headquarter first with certain departments. It’s been a phased approach since then, rolling out to additional locations. There are also standing calls with people using the new process to stay in close communication with how things are going.
The Senior Property Project Manager noted that this is the perfect time to roll out automation. With more and more millennials entering the workforce, they are tech savvy, and if there is a chance to remove any type of paper forms and automate it, they are all for it. Also, after rolling out the new process, there has been a large decline in questions regarding the moves. Moral of the case study is if a company this large can improve their process successfully, any other company can, as well. We are more than happy to help any client through this process.
We’ve enjoyed talking to you all regarding improving your move management process and implementing change management. We look forward to speaking with some of you regarding improving your process. Now I’m going to hand it back over to Christi.
Christi Van Maanen (Moderator)
Great, thank you Tom and Ashley for those excellent tips. Hopefully everyone on the call was able to gain some valuable knowledge that you can bring back to your own organizations. And for those of you who are interested in exploring the office move management topic with us more, feel free to reach out to your Wisp Advisor. If you don’t have a Wisp Advisor, you can contact me directly for a more in-dept conversation or even a demonstration of Wisp’s moves, adds, changes process if needed. You can of course reach out to Tom Mulhern if you’re interested in learning more about change management and what you can do in your own organizations. Before we get to the questions, I also want to remind everyone that we will be doing three more webinars throughout the year. These include Visualizing Utilization and Activity Using your Wisp Floor Plans, Inform to Transform Your Workplace, and Planning a Corporate Move. Please keep your eyes open for future invites in your e-mail.
Now let’s take questions.
Question 1: We have multiple sites, how do I ensure that people in each site are sticking to the process?
Answer 1:
Ashley Betthauser: Making sure that all offices are doing the same process is about that governance. So for example, those key roles. You have those Completers. They are the ones that are instilling the governance and ensuring that all parties are doing the move management process correctly. If you have a lot of locations, just like with ADP, you could do that phased out approach, where you start with some sites and then gradually bring in more sites. What some clients do, as you bring in more sites, you’re having that follow-up communication with them all and making sure that the move management process is working correctly and ensuring that everything is going smoothly.
Tom Mulhern: It’s always good to try to deputize some people at a site. Ask them to personally to lead the charge on it. So that if you’re not directly socially linked to the people that you’re asking to make the change it’s really important. People will often make changes for people that they have a good relationship with when they won’t make that change in the abstract. Having a local champion is good.
Question 2: How do you prevent those ‘Midnight Moves’ that you referred to?
Answer 2:
Ashley Betthauser: So this can be tricky. We have seen where some clients actually work with IT, where they deactivate the data ports when someone moves so that the open stations aren’t able to be used until IT and Facilities are notified. So it’s that partnership with IT to help make sure people aren’t just moving. In other cases, it’s really instilling that governance. So making sure those Completer roles and those Requester roles are helping let people know why it’s important that you don’t just get up and move.
Tom Mulhern: People will do what they’re going to do. Another idea with it is all the things that Ashley said, you can definitely put things in place but it does happen. When it does happen, instead of getting bent out of shape, find the Requester, the requester that should have and sit down with them or talk them through the essentializing the thing that already happened and using the tool to make that move a reality in a digital record. One of the great things about Wisp is that, well not to be too promotional but I can afford to be, a useful thing with Wisp is that the tool for move management is that it’s also used by our clients as sort of a wayfinding map. How do I find Ashley and where she sits presently is one of the uses for it. Not so much appealing to that you violated the process, but instead, it’s really important for people to be able to find people, can we set this right. Once a Requester has been through this hassle of having to retroactively move somebody, maybe they have a little bit more incentive to do it proactively the next time when it’d actually do them some good. That’s just a straight thought.
Question 3: There’s been a couple of different questions that have come in about this and it has to do with agile or free address space. They’re saying, we have free address, how would you track them or how would you recommend tracking them with this type of process?
Answer 3:
Ashley Betthauser: As many of us know, free address or agile is becoming more and more popular within organizations. This is something that we are currently in the process of enhancing with Wisp. With free address people, it’s still important to have accountability of what the headcount is in your building, but instead of it being to a seat, you have it to a neighborhood.
Tom Mulhern: One of the really interesting things about free address is that some of the issue around moving people is going to go away or at least be dramatically reduced over time. So it’s something that we are watching very carefully.
Question 4: How do you roll this out to the key people?
Answer 4:
Ashley Betthauser: I’ll take that one, and Tom you can add to it. When the key people are identified, follow-up meetings are typically done to discuss the new process. One thing that you want to do is show them how it’s benefiting them by streaming and automating the process. It’s important for them to know that you’re trying to improve the process, and give them less work, not more work. There’s also additional conversations with the key people right before the process is launched. You want to make sure that they feel really comfortable with it prior to it actually being what we call launched and out there.
Tom Mulhern: Yeah, I think that’s extremely well put, Ashley. It gets back down to the communication points that I was making earlier. Put yourself in their shoes, try to get in there early, and when you’re explaining the benefits of it, be sure that you’re sure that the way they’ve been doing it is actually worse than the change. Then you get a good grip on what you’re actually asking them as the change.
Question 5: You touched on this a little bit, Ashley, but here’s another question. Can we control the fields on the request form?
Answer 5:
Ashley Betthauser: The simple answer is, yes! So if I bring up the Space Request Utility. Let me just get to the second screen. All of these fields that are below the Comments section, where it says, “Optional Field Area”, anything can be incorporated here. Whether it’s just text giving instructions. It can be yes or no questions. It can be drop downs, it’s completely configurable and it’s based on what information you’re needing. So the simple answer is yes, it can be updated.
Question 6: Does Gensler have plans to build a planning tool that would mirror this process?
Answer 6:
Ashley Betthauser: Yes. There are actually a few tools in Wisp today for planning. Scenarios gets down to the people in the seats. So if you have a large restack or move going on, you can block off the different sections and the departments. And then we also have an add on called the Group Placement Tool, which is similar to the Space Request Utility, as it was designed as an easy tool for the Department Coordinators or someone that would actually be identifying where the people are sitting within their blocked off area. So they’d go into this Group Placement Tool, and they’d only have their section based on their business unit to place their people into. They’d simply just drop their people into their stations and then it’s automatically brought into the scenario section and has all of those people to seats within it.
Question 7: How do you know that the office move management process is working correctly?
Answer 8:
Ashley Betthauser: Like I mentioned, it’s important to have those follow-up discussions on how the process is working. So whether it’s a weekly call or monthly call, whatever it is, and you want to make sure it’s working correctly. What you can do is the hope is that with the new process, that you have a decrease in your walk audits. Because as it’s being a proactive approach, then the people are being updated as it’s happening and you’re not needing to do those walk audits for those ‘Midnight Movers’ or the people that aren’t updated in the system. The data is staying up-to-date. You can also even look at some data analysis in Wisp to ensure that this process is working, because you’re able to see if requests are coming in via the Requesters verses one specific person reactively going in and updating the system as well.
Question 9: Here’s another one. And you touched on this a little bit, Ashley already, but isn’t opening up the Requester role to anyone in the organization risky?
Answer 9:
Ashley Betthauser: That is one of the concerns that does come up about opening up the process to more and more people. Like we mentioned, it really promotes that transparency and there is still that governance in the process. They’re not messing up the information. And if there is concerns about them being able to view floor plans, typically they could get up and walk around to see where those people are sitting anyways. So the benefits of being able to roll out move management software to the lines of business outweigh the risks.
Tom Mulhern: Yeah, I liked to think about it that this is like Wikipedia or Yelp or there’s obviously always opportunities. There’s very little reason in a corporate setting or organizational setting for people to do bad behavior. Those open permission data systems are the ones that have become the most accurate data systems around. Long since gone are the days when a mapping company like Google has to go around and map every single thing for themselves. There are data feeds and just the crowd sourcing of information is a really contemporary and smart way to do it. While I’m sure there are potential downsides, I think there’s mostly potential on the upside. Like I said earlier, people have a stake in the data, whether they’re the Requester and they’ve been moving people around on that map or they’re an end user who has been using it routinely as a phone map or even an executive user that has been using it to take a look and understand the flows of the people in the building. So the openness is a real advantage in this case. And that’s also what we’ve been told by clients.
Question 10: How strong are the reports and the MAC (moves, adds, changes) automation process by location?
Answer 10:
Ashley Betthauser: There is some reporting in Wisp that’ll tell you churn and the movement within the building. Wisp is always capturing all of the information about a move and the move management. There is also that raw data that we can gather and manipulate it and change it to see all the different statistics that are needed. Like I mentioned, you’re able to see down to who is actually submitting the request in which location, how often they’re submitting them, which Completers are going in making the request verses the Requesters. So there is reporting around it, and the raw data can paint any picture that you’re wanting to see about the statistics in moves, adds, changes automation.
Christi Van Maanen: Great, thank you, Ashley. It looks like we have covered all of the questions that have come in. If you do think of others, please feel free to reach out to any of us, and we’ll address your move management questions that way. Just wanted to thank everyone again for joining us, and we look forward to hearing more about your move processes that you implement. And again, we are happy to help, so give us a call. Bye, everyone.
Download a PDF of our move management best practices
Learn more about managing moves with Wisp