Simplify Scheduling with EmergingSoft

The healthcare industry is always being asked to do more with less.  Hospitals, clinics and providers require efficient room and resource scheduling solutions that help reduce costs and maximize productivity. Resources might include traditional conference room equipment such as white boards and LCD displays as well as more sensitive, high value equipment such as medical instruments and lab equipment.

A resource and room scheduling solution to book conference rooms and equipment have traditionally been done using pen and paper or manually. This method requires inefficient double entry and in many cases, causes confusion if a reservation is moved or ca nceled. By consolidating the scheduling processes in a simple and easy to use interface within Microsoft Outlook, healthcare organization experience measurable end user productivity improvements and cost reductions.

MeetingPlanner from EmergingSoft provides a single solution for room, equipment and service reservations in addition to food services, video conferencing and facilities set up scheduling.

Situation

A large North American healthcare provider utilized multiple tools to manage events, room schedules and equipment reservations. The help desk was overrun with multiple calls to schedule these event or resource.  A central team was required for room scheduling, food services orders, equipment reservations and room set up. In some instances, a single meeting required (4) calls to the help desk.  In addition, facilities, IT and food services resources were not always aware of a meeting time or venue change, creating support inefficiency and waste.

Solution

• MeetingPlanner was picked as the optimal single source solution to meet the business and technology requirements for the organization.
• The easy to use MeetingPlanner integration with Microsoft Outlook was deployed to every individual desktop.
• Features such as equipment and room reservations, food services and facilities requests were deployed out of the box to support the organizations requirements.
• Eliminated the need to use multiple systems to schedule rooms, equipment, teleconferences, catering or AV.
• Extensive reporting was made available for room and resource utilization.
• Migrated data from an existing stand alone help desk application into the MeetingPlanner database to ensure historical reservation data was maintained.

Benefits

• Drastically decreased calls to the help desk and facilities.
• Eliminated double booking and resource conflicts.
• Provided a single solution for work flow calendar views for food services and facilities.
• Eliminated reliance on Exchange Administrators for room and resource adjustments, adds and deletes.
• Freed up the conference management staff from booking rooms so they could to focus on event planning, support and room management.

Reduce costs, eliminate double booking conflicts and improve space utilization

Background

As a global corporation planned for an office move to a new facility, it was determined that a single scheduling tool was required to improve scheduling efficiency, optimize room utilization and improve internal communication with support teams. The current scheduling solution included use of Microsoft Exchange Resource Mailboxes for conference room scheduling and on-line/paper forms for equipment, facilities services and food services scheduling.

With over 10,000 employees in multiple locations, the current process for room and services scheduling was inefficient, time consuming, costly and created opportunities for double booking conflicts. In addition, corporate services and the facilities team needed to allocate dedicated staff to schedule equipment, provide services and enter catering orders requested by the end user population. Lastly, because there wasn't a central tool collecting reservation data; real estate space, equipment and facility support utilization was unavailable.

Key Requirements

Senior management, corporate services and frequent schedulers determined the following capabilities would be required in a new scheduling solution:

• Ease of use - Microsoft Outlook and web access
• Room and facility schedule views
• Advanced search engine to find rooms that meet users needs
• Schedule rooms, equipment, services and catering in one scheduled event/meeting
• Integration with Active Directory
• Time Zone Translation
• Automated work flow and real time notification for reservation changes
• Eliminate double booking
• Support recurring meetings

Solution

After a complete review of industry options, MeetingPlanner was determined to be the best solution to address the organization's room, equipment and services scheduling needs. MeetingPlanner was easily deployed throughout the organization and immediately provided improved scheduling efficiency and support team productivity. Users were able to find rooms that met their room and equipment needs immediately in their Outlook appointment. In addition, if the meeting time changed, the reserved rooms and resources automatically updated as well.

The equipment, facilities and catering support teams experienced a dramatic impact too. No longer were dedicated schedulers required to book equipment, support and catering. These team members were now in a position to better manage real estate, equipment and analyze the use of rooms and services, allowing them to optimize their real estate and capital equipment investments.

MeetingPlanner simplified scheduling, reduced costs and optimized utilization, providing the organization with a return on investment within 18 months.