EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

SIMC Business Project was carried out in cooperation with Johnson Controls Inc., a multi-industrial and multi-national company, represented by its Global WorkPlace Solutions division. This project was aimed to explore potential for further digitization of facility management services in the areas of reception, cleaning, meeting room management and employee dining. As the result of the project, 4 elaborated product concepts involving existing and emerging technologies have been developed and presented to the project partner.

The project was conducted in three phases. In the first phase, end user needs and problems have been discovered through secondary (265 sources) and primary (138 interviews and 339 survey responses) research. Market, technological, economic and social trends have been identified and prioritized. During the second phase the identified problems and needs were crowdsourced; the ideas to solve those problems have been generated both within and outside the project team and further elaborated. In the third phase, a shortlist of about 40 product ideas was presented to the project partner and the selected 4 ideas were further developed into detailed product concepts. The methodology used included Lead User and Design Thinking methods.

Meeting Room Management (MRM) and Employee Dining

Working environments and eating habits are changing within meeting room management and employee dining. Research indicates that employees are demanding more mobility, flexibility and customization. Key challenge within the field of MRM is the willingness of employees to work from multiple locations and use various kinds of mobile devices to schedule meetings or book a meeting room. At the same time, facility managers seek to increase room utilization and improve time management. Automatic room booking and cancelling systems as well as digital signage were identified as promising technological solutions to cope with these challenges. In the field of employee dining, it was established that employees are increasingly interested in fresh, organic, or vegetarian food while demanding transparent information about the ingredients and nutritive value of their meal in order to stay fit and healthy. As a response to this need, a concept of a mobile application to aid users in achieving a healthy lifestyle was developed by the project team.

Cleaning

The commercial cleaning industry is more complex than it seems. This can be attributed to the large number of key players and components of which it is comprised. The major challenges faced by cleaning company owners and managers is that firstly, the acquisition of meaningful information concerning cleaning personnel productivity and secondly, that motivation plays a major role concerning the implementation of instructions and knowledge acquired during trainings. In terms of technologically oriented solutions to these challenges, four key trends emerged; they are monitoring systems, mobile devices and software, big data collection and management and HR development of cleaning personnel. Out of these four, the chosen main idea for further development was that of a wireless sensor network (WSN) equipped with heat and motion sensors that could optimize the work conducted by cleaning personnel.

Reception Services

The management of reception services is continuously evolving. A strong tendency to simplify services and create cost efficiencies is apparent. At the same time new technologies and especially mobile devices are increasingly used to support reception services. In this context, three key challenges were determined in this industry: human touch, time efficiency, and aversion to the apparent self-service. First, people highly value human touch in reception services and appreciate service-oriented and flexible support. Second, research has clearly shown that customers do not like to waste time at the front desk. They would sincerely appreciate the possibility to transfer the required information upfront and at a time convenient to them (for instance while travelling). Third, people are adverse to apparent self-service such as check-in kiosks at the airport. They feel cheated for a service they paid for. However, when using their own mobile devices, this sensation is absent and, in fact, is perceived as a valuable extra service. Taking all this into account, a concept of a reception app, which among other functions allows visitors to register and place special requests in advance, has been developed. In this way efficiency at the front desk can be increased while conserving the element of personal interaction.

Cooperation Partner

• Johnson Controls
  Global Workplace Solutions
  Bamlerstrasse 5c
  45141 Essen
  Germany

• Hannah Hahn, MBA
  hannah.hahn@jci.com
  www.johnsoncontrols.de

Student team

• Olga Bratsun
  Alberto Carraro Baido
  Antonia Ehmayr
  Alen Faljic
  Angelika Maria Götz
  Peter Hackl
  Lydia Karakonstanti
  Markus Maier
  Giovanna Menna
  Severin Schwarzer
  Henrik Josef Sulz
  Sarah (Zhan Feng) Tang
  Alessandra Vita
  Olena Zagorodna