ArcGIS Indoors

Space Planning for COVID-19 Recovery

Three stacked building floorplans illustrating conflicts of social distance measurements for open seating areas.
Three stacked, building floorplans illustrating conflicts of social distance measurements for open seating areas.

Space Planning for COVID 19 Recovery

Current Situation

Since the outbreak of Global COVID-19 Pandemic the demands for our real estate and facilities management customers have rapidly evolved. Many organizations that occupy dozens – or even hundreds of facilities – completely transitioned to working from home.  This has left entire portfolios un-occupied for months, and restricted access to secure environments and information some employees need to fully perform their duties.  Now, many organizations are planning to enable certain employees to re-enter their facilities in phases of a re-opening.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in numerous studies, sharing indoor space is a major SARS-CoV-2 infection risk. While organizations are faced with many important decisions as recovery efforts are underway, perhaps the most important question of all, is how can we prioritize employee health and safety in our facility re-entry plans?

Companies must properly plan how their indoor space is used to ensure safety and security of their employees. Yet, their data is often limited, or siloed at best, and time consuming to process. The current solutions are only short-term, leaving stakeholders disconnected, and the occupants as an after-thought. These task forces need a common platform to visualize, analyze, and share new plans to ensure the health and safety of mission critical employees.

 

"All identified outbreaks of three or more cases occurred in an indoor environment, which confirms that sharing indoor space is a major SARS-CoV-2 infection risk."

Hua Qian, Te Miao, Li Liu, Xiaohong Zheng, Danting Luo, Yuguo Li Professors: Southeast University, University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, University of Hong Kong
ArcGIS Indoors Space Planner illustrating social distance measures as an analytical layer to facilitate planning.
ArcGIS Indoors Space Planner illustrating social distance measures as an analytical layer to facilitate planning.

Space Planning for COVID-19 Recovery

Space Planning for COVID-19 Recovery with ArcGIS Indoors leverages a set of tools that modernize your floorplan data management, facilitates better planning across the portfolio, and engages occupants involved in new seating arrangements and protocols. The solution is an easy to deploy SaaS offering with as many secure user identities as needed. Read more about space planning for COVID-19 Recovery below.

Floorplans stacked for many buildings across a campus environmentFloorplans stacked for many buildings across a campus environment in a web-based indoor map viewer.
Floorplans stacked for many buildings across a campus environment Floorplans stacked for many buildings across a campus environment in a web-based indoor map viewer.

Visualize every floorplan

Rather than relying on individual CAD drawings – modernize your floorplan data management with indoor mapping. Users can securely access and visualize indoor maps of every floorplan across the facility or portfolio in just a few clicks. Indoor maps are configured to represent seat safety or occupancy by person, business unit, return phase, or any other attribute of the unit. Use these visualizations to help your task force easily see who is assigned to sit where to better engage stakeholders in the decision-making process. Operationalize your CAD and BIM for re-use across any business process.

Three stacked building floorplans illustrating conflicts of social distance measurements for open seating areas.
Three stacked building floorplans illustrating conflicts of social distance measurements for open seating areas.

Streamline Safety Analysis

You can eliminate tedious, individual analysis of each seat across every floor. ArcGIS Indoors tools are configurable to your organization’s preferred social distance measures and can run on every seat on every floor – improving the speed of safety analysis. Further refine the analysis by running on specific space types, or other attributes such as an occupant’s business unit, tenure, or return phase. Use these analyses to re-assign occupants to safe seats to ensure their health and safety.

Improve Planning Transparency

Coordinating with stakeholders to operationalize plans can often be difficult due to conflicts of interest or organizational priorities. Use web-based visualizations of floorplans and safety analysis in the space move process to improve communication of where conflicts of social distance measures are and make the most critical space moves first. Even use these indoor maps to show where flexible space could allow employees to reserve safe seats on a rolling basis, or only on specific days of the week. The increased transparency will show everyone that employee health and safety is the top priority and ensure the successful implementation of new protocols.

Ensure Safety and Security

Engage occupants in these new protocols with end user applications that help them get more comfortable and confident in their new workspaces. As the most important stakeholders in the re-opening of facilities, occupants can access new workplace maps that help them understand the new configuration of their facilities. Web and mobiles apps show updated seating arrangements, location of wellness stations, or other workspace availability – offering the ability to book safe workspaces and conference rooms or request sanitation to a specific location. Internal memos and bulletins will not be enough to make such a big transition.

Indoors Space Planner and Mobile Workplace App for occupant wayfinding, workspace reservation, and sanitation requests.
Indoors Space Planner and Mobile Workplace App for occupant wayfinding, workspace reservation, and sanitation requests.

New Work from Home Policies

Due to improved employee happiness and productivity, flexible work from home (WFH) policies have long been on the rise. With the opportunity adapt space strategies that enable better space utilization and access to new talent pools, organizations that make updates to their own long-term protocols will keep employees safe in the near-term, and differentiate themselves, be more competitive, or continue to lead their industries in employee experience for the long-term. With ArcGIS Indoors, organizations have a solution that will drive valuable employee interactions for years after COVID-19 recovery concludes.

Learn how to get started with Space Planning for COVID-19 Recovery Here

About the author

Beau is a Geodesign and Planning Consultant in Esri Professional Services. Previously, Beau spent 5 years developing Esri's indoor GIS business line taking ArcGIS Indoors and ArcGIS Indoors Positioning to market. He also spent time at SoftDig, a private utility locating firm, AECOM, and TomTom. Beau is motivated to use his professional experience to help customers deploy geospatial solutions and solve climate and nature related problems in their communities.

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