by Shane Henson — October 19, 2012—Redwood Systems, a provider of building-performance lighting solutions, has announced it will soon release the Redwood Room Tracker, a room solution that can help facilities managers for office buildings and other facilities with an abundance of meeting and conference rooms to more confidently make space optimization decisions.
According to the company, the Redwood Room Tracker leverages granular sensor data provided by the company’s smart building platform to provide real-time insights into conference room availability and usage patterns, and will be available at the end of the year.
A well-known problem for organizations is that a significant amount of scheduled meeting space ultimately goes unused, notes Redwood Systems in explaining why it developed the product. Freeing up this unused space creates additional meeting room capacity without increasing the size of the overall real estate portfolio.
The Redwood Room Tracker uses sensors embedded in each meeting room to constantly collect actual occupancy data. It integrates with popular calendaring systems including Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar to automatically free up unoccupied rooms that had been previously scheduled for meetings. The solution also makes finding an available meeting room a less aggravating and much faster experience by giving workers real-time information on current occupancy in all conference rooms, the company says.
Further, says Redwood Systems, by providing real-time occupancy data for every conference room, organizations can better understand how space is truly used and plan for how it can be used more efficiently, matching the building’s meeting room capabilities with actual demand. With this better analytical support for their strategic property decisions, corporate property and facilities managers can tangibly improve their companies’ bottom line by avoiding costly property expansion.
