A key driver behind any decision to buy meeting room management software will be the opportunity cost associated with meeting spaces that do not get used and employee time that is wasted chasing fruitlessly after a meeting room, for whatever reason.
There are several variables in play when trying to get a fix on the cost to a business of managing meeting spaces inefficiently, and any underlying assumptions can be argued one way or another. A theoretical case study, based upon numbers that Door Tablet has culled from global industry research as well as the experience of its own customers, reveals an elementary cost/benefits analysis that we believe stands up against most people’s experience of their own business.
Imagine this
Let’s consider a building in a major city, housing a busy enterprise employing 250 employees in a building containing 12 meeting rooms. The enterprise does not have a software management system for managing these rooms, for which meetings are arranged in some variation of “the old-fashioned way” – paper-based, haphazard, random verging on chaotic, and often downright exasperating.
These meeting rooms are assigned an average fixed cost in the corporate budget of £20,000 per year ”just to be there” (used or unused), for a total cost of £240,000. Associated costs for catering and cleaning do not figure as it would be assumed that these elements would be in the budget on the basis that the rooms were there to be used. In fact, the annual occupancy rate for the rooms collectively runs at 60%, representing an expenditure of £96,000 on a facility that is not being used.
The company surveys its employees and discovers that the average person wastes a weekly average of ten minutes (a very low estimate) chasing down room space that either does not exist, or the availability simply is not apparent. Given an annual average gross salary of £40k per employee, this equates to an annual charge to the company of £41,500k to pay its workforce to faff about looking for meeting rooms.
Add this to the annual facility charge of £96,000 and the total annual cost to the business of not managing its meeting rooms estate efficiently is £137,500. It doesn’t take many years of this money-flushing before the finance director determines that it’s time to up the corporate game.
Door Tablet to the rescue
Once registered on the Door Tablet website, she or he will consult our Quotation Tool and might start with the most modest requirement – one software licence and a tablet for each of the 12 meeting rooms, plus one server, warranty cover for three years and an allowance of a couple of IT service hours to assist with the software deployment . . . and hey presto! The happiest of surprises reveals that the Door Tablet solution comes in at under £10,000 which means that, if the system is bought as a New Year’s present to the enterprise, it has paid for itself before winter is out. How?
Wasted employee time is now negligible. Assuming that the occupancy rate increases even modestly to 80% from the earlier rate of 60%, total savings against erstwhile expenditure is almost £90,000. Given the solution expenditure of just £10,000, come Year 2 the finance director is on a bonus.