FM:Systems

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM), the largest health insurer in Michigan, faced significant challenges with their room booking process across their 15 properties used by over 8,000 employees and multiple subsidiary businesses. The Director of Facilities Administration, Kathy Lord, noticed that the room booking process was complicated and inefficient. Rooms would often get overbooked or not released properly when a meeting was canceled, leading to vacant rooms that could have been utilized by other groups. This resulted in significant frustration among employees and clear workspace efficiency issues. The company needed a solution to reduce unintentional double bookings or no-shows and streamline the company-wide system for managing room scheduling and desk bookings.

In the summer of 2019, two healthcare organizations announced their intent to merge. To accommodate the growing, soon-to-be 5,000-person team, the organizations purchased an expensive 42-acre property to become its new headquarters. The property included four multi-level buildings amounting to a combined 522,000 square feet. It also featured an additional 14,000 square foot mansion, where the previous company that owned this space would host events. The new campus represented combining two of New England’s largest and most iconic nonprofit healthcare companies that, for decades, were competitors. Planning the office opening involved needing to prepare the new headquarters for a hybrid work arrangement. To streamline the tedious, cost-intensive process of moving offices, the newly combined organization needed a workplace management solution that could provide space planning, strategic planning, and room and desk booking capabilities. And, like most mergers, the organization had to navigate which existing apps and systems each entity was using could work best going forward.

The leading space technology and intelligence company was experiencing rapid growth and had recently expanded its real estate footprint due to a strategic acquisition. The facilities team was tasked with making sense of space utilization data from multiple inherited manual systems and sources across the expanded real estate portfolio. The lack of a centralized system made it difficult to understand how each corporate site was being used and to provide reliable information on how to best optimize each. Additionally, the organization was shifting to hybrid and flexible work arrangements following the Covid-19 pandemic. A key part of their return to work strategy was to ensure employees had guaranteed workspaces and optimal in-office experiences.

Washington County was heavily reliant on an outdated legacy system for space planning, managing their evolving workplace and assets, and employee experience needs. The system required heavy customization, leading to frequent inconsistencies and user errors, and lacked intuitive design, discouraging the facilities and space planning team from using it. The addition of a new property to the County's real estate portfolio, with plans to triple its size, made the necessary upgrades to the existing system exceptionally difficult. The County struggled with visibility into their workplace expansion project, tracking utilization data and technician work orders, and handling conditional formatting for necessary security access requests for each department. The legacy system also lacked effective data gathering for proactively managing preventive maintenance tasks, leading to manual input and management of large numbers of equipment pieces.