Tag: new module

Release Notes: Saltmine v3.9 Occupancy Planning

Date: April 4th, 2022

What’s new?

Occupancy Planning (OP): Provides the day-to-day ability to manage occupancy – “butts in seats”-  on site with seat assignments and support for seat usage types leveraging employee data with HR integration. It allows users to manage seat allocation & assignments with support for occupancy audits, increasing visibility and control of data by understanding  space performance and needs.

OP  is built for occupancy planners & workplace strategists, as well as real estate professionals that are focused on optimizing their space and planning for the future of work. Occupancy planning is great for power users of the design and strategy modules. 

The introduction of OP module brings the following new key capabilities to the platform: 

Updates to Employee Location Data 

  • To enable easy and powerful employee to location mapping, customers can quickly upload their existing employee mapping to Saltmine via the Employee page or directly edit the employee location via a dialog or access the OP editor to engage more interactively with their data. 

Support for Seat Usage Types

  • We simplified  seat usage types on the platform based on a combination of parameters (seat-able, assignable and ratio-ed) to enable flexibility in updating seat usage type behavior in the long-term while providing  support for the following Seat Usage Types out of the box with this release: Primary, Secondary, Shared, Hot Desking, Hotelling, and Reserved.

Powerful Employee Search Feature

  • We now support portfolio-wide (across sites) employee location search on the platform. This feature makes search for an employee’s location across the database quick via a single query. 

Updates to Sites

  • We now support a license based access on Sites i.e only if a user has an OP license would they be able to launch the new OP editor, if not we would re-route them back their finalised project design. This means the occupancy plan can be launched directly from the Site Overview page for easy access. 

A New OP Editor!

  • We’re rolling out a new, shiny OP editor. It comes with focused features optimized to do OP with support for employee & block Room search, Highlights, Allocation & Assignment changes for Block Rooms, Group selection and much more!  

Do Everything In One Place with the New BlockRoom Panel

  • We’ve introduced a new Block Room panel to provide users a single place to update their occupancy preferences per Block Room allowing selection between Seat Usage Types, allot capacity, allocate capacity to Org Units and assign employees — all via a single interface! 

Audit Occupancy for an entire building in one place

  • To aid continuous, real-time reporting, we’ve created an easy to use occupancy audit panel which  provides an org unit wide breakdown of occupancy for a building based on Headcount, seat count, allocation status (Vacant/Allocated) and Assignment status (Assigned/ Unassigned). 

Check for Available Capacity & Org Unit Allocations

  • The Highlights feature from the navigation panel allows users to view Block-Rooms with available capacity or availability based on org unit allocation with ease.


Pre-requisites to setup OP

We’ve introduced many new exciting capabilities on the platform to support occupancy planning. Though to ensure data consistency and integrity — transitioning from project design to occupancy planning —  the user needs to fulfill the following preconditions before they start with OP on Saltmine: 

Get a new OP license! 

  • We’ve introduced a new license for Occupancy Planning on the platform. Our system admins can enable the OP license in consultation with our Sales/CS teams.  
  • HR integration is a prerequisite for the occupancy planning license to sync employee data to Saltmine for Occupancy Planning.

Block Rooms, not Blocks for OP

  • For OP, we use Block Rooms as proxies for seats/rooms as the  module is configured to work ONLY with Block Rooms and not Blocks. Each Block Room has an ID to ensure data integrity.

“Finalised” Designs, “Built” Project

  • Floor designs “Finalised” in the strategy and transitioned to “Built” project status proceeds for Occupancy Planning to ensure latest designs are used for the Occupancy Planning.. In case of any design changes, a  user can go back into projects, make edits, and then continue with Occupancy Planning.

Get the required user permissions for OP!

  • We have introduced permissions – “Edit Occupancy”, “Manage Sites” & “Edit Occupancy” to accommodate your needs on the platform.