Meeting room booking software drives efficiency
For most of us, meetings consume a significant amount of our working week. While their purpose is to progress business, they also represent a cost, both in the salaries of the people attending the meeting and the process to coordinate the people, rooms and resources to run the meeting. Luckily, meeting room booking software can facilitate meeting set up, increase efficiency and effectively reduce the cost of running meetings.
Setting up a meeting means getting the right people in the room, or online, at the right time, knowing what rooms are available and ordering resources such as AV equipment, flip charts and catering and potentially organising parking. The meeting attendees may be internal to the company or visitors from external organisations. And increasingly, attendees will be at a range of locations and joining by audio or video conference using a laptop or mobile.
So what seems like a simple process is actually a mini-project consisting of many steps. And the potential for inefficiency multiplies as the number of meetings, attendees and locations scales.
A meeting room booking solution provides the central point of coordination between the meeting organiser, attendees, rooms, resources and conferencing links, regardless of where each is located. This means that attendees availability can be checked, invitations can be coordinated, everybody can be updated on meeting changes in real time, available rooms can be located, reminders can be sent and external resources can be ordered and dispatched to the right place at the right time.
And frustrating problems can be prevented such as double-booked rooms, people turning up for cancelled meetings and no video or audio links for remote attendees.
Looking from a broader business perspective, a meeting room booking system helps optimise asset utilisation. Real estate represents a significant cost to a business and underutilised meeting rooms are an idle asset that can be deployed for other uses. The meeting room booking solution provides reporting on room utilisation to assist in space planning.
It’s not just about the physical space or real estate, an unused meeting room is consuming expense through heating, cooling and lighting.
Digital Signage can also be incorporated into a meeting room solution. Not only can signage be used for directional information, a screen outside the meeting room can display meeting information – meeting topic, agenda, attendees, host name, timing – as well as showing the schedule of upcoming meetings. Because meeting attendees may be external to the organisation, a meeting room booking system that integrates with a Visitor Management system creates a seamless experience for guests.
A meeting room booking system helps organisations take the pain and cost out of organising meetings. And increasingly, the chosen solution is cloud based which means the solution is easy and fast to set up and circumvents the need for onsite deployment.