Simple and sustainable meeting room management to free up 20% more workspace

For ten years, Crédit Agricole Normandie in Caen and its 800 employees have occupied a 20,000m² building. While this mutual bank’s main mission is to have a presence in the region to support the local economy, it also wants to provide outstanding working conditions to retain and attract talent. The bank is also keen to manage its large real estate portfolio to optimise its assets.

In order to meet these various goals, Crédit Agricole Normandie has been considering implementing building-related services for its employees and customers for several years. Flavien Deguette, the bank’s Head of IT: “First, we wanted to give our visitors access to our guest Wi-Fi in the two large conference rooms. This was achieved through the implementation of Aruba Wi-Fi 6 terminals and the ClearPass solution. This also meant that our employees could enjoy Wi-Fi access throughout the administrative site.”

Smart Meeting Room Management

Crédit Agricole Normandie has always had 30 meeting rooms that can accommodate between four and 30 people, which employees can book on the spot or in advance. For instant bookings, employees simply scan the QR code of the meeting room with their smartphone when they arrive on the site. Advance reservations are made via a mobile phone app or from a laptop. This booking data is then sent via the Aruba Wi-Fi network to the Jooxter workspace management software solution, which updates the online schedule. The Caen site also has multiple flexible non-bookable workspaces. These “Flex Boxes” are self-service individual workspaces.

“While users like the room reservation app, which is more user-friendly and responsive than our previous solution, we still weren’t able to know if these meeting spaces were actually occupied,” Flavien Deguette points out. What procedure should be triggered if a room has been reserved but no-one turned up? In principle, it should be immediately tagged as being “unoccupied” on the schedule, thus making it available for others. However, until now this was impossible as it required too many resources. Consequently, Crédit Agricole Normandie decided to optimise its existing resources by installing EnOcean occupancy sensors.

Today, around 100 of these occupancy sensors have been installed in the 30 meeting rooms and their benefits are numerous. The first is that they do not require a battery as they are solar-powered. Secondly, they can be connected to the building’s infrastructure, such as communicating with the existing Aruba Wi-Fi hotspots — some of which are equipped with an EnOcean dongle — so that the open and interoperable communication protocol needed by these sensors can use the existing Wi-Fi network. In fact, the radio coverage of an Aruba access point is identical to that of an EnOcean dongle. All the sensor data is routed to a concentration platform, the IoT Connector, hosted at Jooxter. The lifespan of these sensors is over 25 years, proof of their sustainability credentials.

If a reserved room is unoccupied for more than 15 minutes, its status will then show that it is available. “Our objective is to reclaim 20% of unoccupied reserved rooms, which would already be a very good start,” Flavien Deguette explains. It should be noted that these sensors can be detected and secured using Aruba ClearPass Device Insight (CPDI) which provides a full spectrum of network visibility to understand the context of connected devices, such as type, vendor, hardware version and behaviour, including applications and resources used.

Scalable Building

Crédit Agricole Normandie is now in a position to optimise the availability of these meeting rooms and it will soon be testing the installation of multifunction EnOcean sensors. These sensors can detect temperature, humidity, brightness and even vibrations thanks to an accelerometer. They will be placed on tables or desktop computers. The slightest vibration sends data indicating that the office is in use. The aim is to know whether a “Flex Office” is occupied or not, in order to pass on this data to Jooxter via the Aruba Wi-Fi 6 access point integration. In this way, employees can find out, in advance, whether a certain office is vacant or not. The bank is then planning to install an internal GPS solution. Due to the size of the building, this would make it easier for people to navigate to their next meeting room using their smartphones. This infrastructure also makes it easier to track workstation use.

This data concept is key for the bank as it can enhance the value of its building. Because there is no need for new wired infrastructure, EnOcean sensors are simply added to and powered by the Aruba Wi-Fi 6 access points. Moreover, both benefit from a management software tools which have been used and mastered for several years by the administrative team. “What appealed to me was how easy it was to administer the Aruba solution. It only took half a day to install the sensors, pair them with the Wi-Fi access points, and get everything up and running with Jooxter,” Flavien Deguette explains.

Economic and Ecological Benefits

Crédit Agricole Normandie is one the first banks to use occupancy sensors to enhance its digital workplace. This is a first step towards compliance with the BACS (Building Automation & Control Systems) regulation, which requires commercial buildings to control their energy consumption by 2025. In other words, to limit their energy usage.

Aruba, solution partners Jooxter, and EnOcean deliver seamless integration of interoperable platforms capable of meeting these sustainability goals, both economically and environmentally. This results in smarter building management thanks to data that remains local and secure. Indeed, Jooxter centralises all the data in a dashboard that the customer can consult, and it will soon be providing room occupancy reports.