10 reasons why clients choose the MRI Software meeting room booking system

“Erm, excuse me, have you booked this meeting room?”

Does this sound familiar? Meeting rooms are a key shared resource, but not everyone wants to share the room at the same time! The scheduling of these spaces is a day-to-day activity, yet even the simplest of requests can be complicated and time-consuming if you don’t have an efficient conference room booking process. Double-booked meeting rooms. Empty reserved rooms because nobody showed up. Scheduling errors. Catering wastage and room resource conflicts. Poor visitor experiences… the list can go on!

Smaller organizations, perhaps on one floor with five rooms, can probably get by leveraging Outlook or a simple software solution. But what if you are part of a larger organization, with hundreds or thousands of rooms, spread across floors or multiple offices, across multiple time zones? If you fall into this bracket you may need a more multi-functional tool, which offers enterprise features, including two-way calendar integration, mobile booking, global video conference management, room panels, and advanced reporting.

MRI Software’s meeting room booking systems can help improve the availability and utilization of rooms by enabling staff to quickly find and book the right room for their purposes. In addition, they can help make a good first impression at the front of house and provide catering and AV equipment that is customized to guests’ specific requirements.

To help you make the right decision, we’ve highlighted the 10 reasons customers choose the MRI meeting room scheduling software. MRI Conference and Meeting Room Scheduling Software optimizes meeting room and workplace experiences with a fully featured cloud-based software solution that encompasses the reservation, utilization and management of all conference rooms, workspaces and associated client services. Request a demo today!

10 reasons clients choose MRI Software’s meeting room scheduling software

1. Centralized conference room booking

Room Scheduling allows you to adopt a single standardized process for the management of workspace from a self-service or centrally managed perspective. Users can search by location, attribute, capacity or fixture. The user can have varying levels of permission, depending upon their level of access, ability or authority: such as being permitted to read only, request or directly book the room; or not being able to see the room at all. All of these settings are configurable.

2. Meeting room booking ease-of-use

Easy-to-use drag and drop functionality minimizes the number of clicks and keystrokes required to make and update reservations. For example, moving a booking takes just two mouse clicks – and results in all elements of the booking, and all relevant stakeholders being updated automatically.

3. Next-generation conference room booking app for Office 365

MRI’s new Office 365 app for conference room scheduling represents a major step forwards for the space management industry. The Office 365 app enables integration with all Outlook interfaces – Outlook 2013, Outlook 2016, Outlook Web Access and even the OWA app on iOS and Android. The app allows users to book meeting rooms and services in the central system at the same time as creating an appointment in MS Outlook calendar.

4. Flexible working support

Organizations are looking at flexible working strategies as a way of driving smart allocation of space, for significant return on investment. Meeting room scheduling software offers both self-service and centrally managed interfaces. Interactive images depict floor plans showing desk availability. Users can then book a desk with a single click. Integration with MRI’s IWMS & CAFM systems provides holistic approach to space management: all space is planned, managed and scheduled in a single system.

5. Mobile meeting room bookings & QR code check-in

Users can book their space through the Space Scheduling mobile scheduling interface. This allows them to book their own meeting rooms or desks when out of the office, edit any existing meetings or desk bookings, or cancel these bookings. QR codes allow users to check into and book spaces, enabling all the functionality of a touch screen at a fraction of the cost. The functionality enables the business to identify where no show meetings are occurring. QR codes serve to reduce no shows with automatic ‘kick out’ rules when a user has not checked in. This is a cost effective alternative to purchasing touch screens, allowing end users interaction with the booking system, and providing real estate teams with space utilization trend data over time.

6. Conference room touch panel integration

MRI provides room touch panels for enterprise businesses and LiveSign Pro integrates with meeting room scheduling. LiveSign Pro can be securely located right outside the room with the RFID card reader allowing users to quickly schedule meetings and check in and out of meetings.

The bright LED lights display at-a-glance view room availability. LiveSign Pro also features unique centralized panel management for managing, controlling and setting multiple devices anywhere at any time.

7. Five-star visitor management

Visitor experience impacts the brand and perception of the organization. It is imperative that the experience is efficient at all times. Conference room scheduling provides complete visitor management, with full visitor tracking from arrival to departure. MRI’s new bulk upload tool enables users to upload up to 1,000 meeting attendees in a single import. Uploads are available for single bookings, block bookings and even non-room visitor bookings. A unique mobile receptionist tablet app streamlines times of the day where large numbers of visitors and guests are expected during peak times.

8. Centralized room services and global video conference management

Easily manage vendors and associated resources and services for meetings, such as catering, refreshments and audio-visual equipment. With the Service Notification Screen, these service teams can stay up to date with last minute changes to room bookings. This enables service providers to respond to last minute changes.

The system also provides functionality for the scheduling of global videoconference and multipoint events, through viewing available space across borders, locations and time zones and schedule global multipoint event in seconds. AV and service teams are kept up to date with reports, schedules, email updates and the Service Notification Screen. Any changes made to their tasks, such as a change in date or time, will notify the team with an email and a notification on the Service Provider dashboard.

9. Powerful reporting

Space Scheduling has 80 standard reports out of the box, and a brand new reporting applet enables power users to generate pivot style data reports using drag and drop field selection. These include utilization and occupancy statistics, trends analysis, services used, costs by departments and materials used.

The system builds analytics which assist in identifying peaks and troughs for space, helps in the management of teams and resources helping facilities and service partners to provide materials and services driven by the culture and dynamic of the business which is being served.

10. Tried and tested meeting room booking solution

With over 22 years’ experience in room booking we’ve helped businesses all over the world transform the way they manage global meeting rooms and workspaces. By enhancing the leading ‘Hospitality Suite’ technology originally developed by Datacraft Design Ltd in 1994, you benefit from a world-leading, tried and tested solution.

Learn more about MRI’s conference room booking system or contact us today!