Case Studies

Floor Plan Solution Helps Major Bank Reduce Operating Costs

Project at a Glance

RDA created a solution that enables this bank to efficiently manage office real estate. The application helped eliminate the need for an entire floor of office space that was being leased for over $1 million per year. The ability to report on free space and project future space needs reduced the time needed each month to aggregate data associated with open office space from 20 hours (using a manual process) to two minutes (employing report automation). This solution also streamlined the employee on-boarding process.

About Our Client

RDA's client provides a broad range of banking, asset management, wealth management, and corporate and investment banking products and services.

Background

RDA's client needed a central portal to manage all the office real estate within the bank and be able to quickly launch into on-boarding, off-boarding, and transfer workflows. There was also a need to structure all the asset data associated with an office location and accurately report on that data to upper management.

Solution Detail

Using MOSS 2007, Visio, ASP.NET, and Silverlight 2.0, RDA created a comprehensive application that gave office managers the ability to quickly load office floor plans into the application without IT intervention, and effectively maintain and report on all the employee and asset data associated with each cube and office.

The floor planning application was workflow enabled to simplify the process of on-boarding and off-boarding employees.

 

Results

• Company employees were given a simple graphical interface that is integrated directly into their MOSS environment which allows them to quickly search for the cube/office location of employees within the bank. The application loads an image of the floor plan where the employee is seated and highlights their location.
• Resource Administrators were given a solution which enables them to quickly manage both employees and assets within the corporation. From this application, they are able to quickly launch workflows to on-board, off-board, and transfer employees.
• Resource Administrators were given structured data that allowed for accurate reporting and resource planning within the bank.
• The corporation was able to effectively leverage the application to plan for reduction and consolidation of real-estate needs during the current economic climate.

Benefits

This project created the following benefits for our client:

• Usage of this application identified enough free space to eliminate the need for an entire floor of office space that was being leased for over $1 million per year.
• The ability to report on free space and project future space needs reduced the time needed each month to aggregate data associated with open office space from 20 hours (using a manual process) to two minutes (employing a SSRS report).
• Usage of the associated workflow has standardized nine distinct processes into one and ensured that on-boarding is complete and new employees can be effective their first day.

Technically Speaking

The floor planning solution leveraged Microsoft Office tools that were already in place to construct a cost-effective and time-saving solution. The solution started with Microsoft Visio to import the existing floor plan images and mark the area for each cube. Administrators are able to export the Visio file to HTML format and load the file to a standard SharePoint site. Once on the site, the image is married with employee data to provide the visualization and enable the GUI interaction.

Reporting is handled through several SQL Server Reporting Services reports. These reports analyze current space usage and forecast the trend to provide an idea about future space needs. These reports will be leveraged as dashboard components in subsequent project iterations.