Locatee
A smart analytics solution for workspace insights

The modern workforce spends 90,000 long hours in the offices, and yet the productivity is not gratifying. For a business, several factors impact employees’ performance at work. One of those is the inability to provide a favourable workplace that facilitates easy communication between workers. In the current work dynamics marked by smartphones, laptops, and seamless global connectivity, most companies end up paying for the empty desks and extra spaces unnecessarily as many of their employees work from different locations. To address these workspace challenges Zurich-based company, Locatee, offers a big data platform that helps organizations achieve smart buildings where they can track and optimize workspace utilization and in turn, enhance employee work experience. Without having to invest on additional hardware such as IoT devices or sensors, companies can leverage the existing IT infrastructure like Wi-Fi or LAN to improve the workplace experience for their employees and get detailed insights into space utilization, without compromising employees’ privacy. On the backend side, improved transparency and communication helps the corporate real estate teams to base their decisions on reliable facts, have objective discussions with business lines, and drive the real estate ROI.

Companies usually lack transparency and insights into the workspace occupancy. “Where in the building are capacities currently available? How do the utilization and vacancies develop in the long-term? Where is there growth or consolidation potential?” These are daily struggles Corporate Real Estate Teams are faced with.

With Locatees solutions’ portfolio-wide space utilization insights, Corporate Real Estate Managers are able to make fact-based decisions and optimize workspaces. “With our solution, customers can incorporate data points all over the real estate portfolio and are able to gain insights into how office buildings and floors are used,” affirms Thomas Kessler, Founder, and CEO of Locatee. By processing real-time data with advanced machine learning and indoor positioning algorithms, the platform empowers employees and administrators with high transparency to navigate the workspaces swiftly and easily. While a smart building tackles the constraints of manual navigation, it enables real estate teams to make informed business decisions.

“Unlike other IoT-centric companies, we integrate the data gleaned from the existing IT infrastructure without the need of implementing additional hardware,” highlights Kessler. “The scalability of our data sources helps our clients—spread across six continents—overcome their workspace management limitations.” In a typical client engagement, Locatee understands the client’s requirements and the current IT setup before deploying its analytics platform. The location-agnostic feature of Locatee’s platform means that the platform can be deployed in buildings across the globe, without having to visit them physically. The company offers a mobile app for its clients’ employees to locate the resources and people intuitively on an opt-in basis.

A leading American Biotech company collaborated with Locatee to evaluate sites with the purpose of optimizing its long-term workspace strategy. With Locatee, the company was able to identify the capacity for potential collaborative workspaces and improve space efficiency by 30 percent. With the insights and changes, the Biotech company was able to realize a savings potential of CHF 2.5 million. In other instance, Locatee aided Swiss Post to overcome the challenges in capacity planning and employee experience. Using Locatee’s solution, Swiss Post improved the workspace utilization efficiency and also reduced spend on workspace by close to 20 percent.

Locatee continues to enhance its solution and help its clients’ employees perform their tasks efficiently. With the changing client requirements, the company aims to stay in lockstep with the developments and build futuristic smart building solutions.