Surfy is a digital solution for managing the workplace environment and mapping building occupancy, perfectly suited to the needs of General Services and the evolving modes of work in companies. I discovered a passionate team that listens to its customers.
Flowbird is a French company, a player in urban mobility and smart city solutions. It offers a comprehensive range of parking management solutions and ticketing solutions for public transport.
I started my position at Flowbird in 2019, with one of my key tasks being the management of building occupancy. No tool had been previously implemented for this. Once a year, we would try our best to insert people's names onto AUTOCAD plans. Conducting the annual occupancy review took 15 days to try to transmit reliable data to management control for service-based billing. Throughout the year, managing occupancy evolution was challenging on Autocad. So, I looked for tools on the market that could meet our needs. I tasked one of my colleagues with sourcing a digital solution, particularly during a training on general services indicators. Surfy was a solution used by several attendees at this training, and we decided to explore it.
I wanted real visibility on occupancy, especially to know the actual available workstations for new employees. Flowbird has a low turnover rate of around 7%, but we regularly use subcontractors. We were often questioned about the lack of space, but we had no data to verify if these claims were valid or how to address them. Our data for establishing the distribution key for management control was also complex to obtain and lacked reliability. With Surfy, updates on arrivals and departures of employees are made continuously, thanks to the contribution of assistants in the departments. Their user profile gives them access to basic functions to add people and assign them to a workstation. In the long term, we aim to automate the implementation of people with interoperability with our HRIS. Thus, we would only have to manage the assignment of newcomers, and workstations would automatically become available with the departure of an employee. As the name of our service suggests, our mission is to facilitate the life of Services in the company, especially when a Service is reorganizing or when new positions are created. Thanks to Surfy, we were able to better perceive the actual occupancy and optimize the concept of shared or flex workstations. I manage the occupancy of offices in Paris and other provincial cities from Besançon with the same ease as for our local premises in Besançon. Our need for flexibility and visibility has, of course, increased with the implementation of remote work due to the COVID pandemic. It was at this time that we integrated Flex-Office at our headquarters in Neuilly as a pilot site (no fixed workstation assignments and the implementation of a reservation solution). Managing occupancy became even more complex with remote work, and the Surfy tool allows us to have occupancy data. Today, depending on employees' preferences, each department has the option to choose between fixed, shared, or Flex Office assignments. This flexibility is only possible because we have the digital tools to support it, whether it's Surfy or our reservation solution (which uses the Surfy plan database).
Better knowledge of occupancy has repercussions in many areas:
- Recruitment: knowing if I have space to welcome new employees. Surfy's occupancy ratio gives me the square meters per person. With a threshold floor value, I know on which floor or in which office I can or cannot install new people.
- Security - to comply with fire capacity or in the mapping of QSSE operators (Quality, Health-Safety, Environment) and evacuation sectors
- Compliance with labor laws regarding the number of restrooms available for staff
- Water or energy consumption based on occupancy, particularly with the obligations of the tertiary decree
- The typology of floors and their surface area to manage the cleaning service, among other things
- The inventory of equipment such as electrical cabinets, furniture, water fountains, and multifunction copiers located in Surfy
If we don't use Surfy for the layout itself, we easily and regularly establish workstation assignment scenarios, to distribute teams according to functional needs.
The technical administrator of the solution is trained as a draftsman. When you know how to use architecture or layout software such as AUTOCAD or Picon, Surfy is a breeze. We are even 100% autonomous in creating new buildings. The majority of users only use the simple mapping and assignment functions. Even without being an expert, executive assistants can easily use Surfy.
Two projects are currently being considered with Surfy for the implementation of new features: (editor's note: Flowbird is a proactive client whose evolving needs inspire us with new features. A true win-win partnership as we like them) We wish to further refine our knowledge of occupancy by integrating telework data, that is, the planned days of presence of employees. It's not about real-time occupancy with sensors at the workstation, but knowing day by day how the building is supposed to be occupied in theory. We then distinguish between the notions of assignment of a workstation, which may in fact be unoccupied half the week, and theoretical occupancy with telework data. Today, we still perform physical counts twice a week, but we hope to eventually implement a counting solution at the entrance of each building that would be connected to Surfy and would provide a real average occupancy data that we could compare to the theoretical data. I'm looking to have the most reliable occupancy data possible, the closest reflection of reality without going into complex and expensive solutions with sensors at every workstation. The second project is to be able to group several buildings into campus forms on the dashboard to set up management sub-units, especially groupings by geographical area, city, or region first, then by country because we want to use Surfy for overseas premises. Otherwise, the most imminent step is probably connecting Surfy with our HRIS, Workday, for the automation of the import of employees mentioned earlier.
I feel a real collaboration with the Surfy team. There is a genuine listening to our needs and a willingness to find solutions. Sometimes there are providers for whom we don't seem to really count. This is not the case with the Surfy team, who really make us feel important to them.