What is a visitor management system?
Traditionally visitor management was managed manually via a check-in book or ledger at reception or the entry point. A visitor management system replaces the book and pen to digitise the management of visitors, employees, and contractors within an organisation.
Visitor management software enables organisations to manage and account for every visitor, employee, and contractor from arrival through to the departure of the physical workplace.
How does a visitor management system work?
A visitor management system provides a safe and secure way for organisations to ensure those coming on-site meet their compliance obligations. This can be done by notifying visitors, employees, and contractors of on-site hazards or requesting they sign an NDA to ensure they meet and agree to onsite policies and procedures.
Modern organisations use powerful, cloud-based visitor management software, operated either by front-line staff such as a receptionist, security guards or via self-service systems such as a kiosk. A visitor management system provides strong digital security while efficiently connecting visitors with their hosts.
Visitor management systems give organisations the ability to record and report on visitors’ movements, know that only those who meet on-site regulations can gain access, and the ability to account for everyone in the case of an emergency.
Three-step sign-in/out process using visitor management software
1. Employee or guest sign-in
When an employee or guest arrived on-site they have multiple ways to sign-in. An employee could be automatically signed in as they enter the geofence, via an access control system, FOH team, or kiosk.
A guest can be signed in via the receptionist, a self-service kiosk, or a QR code. The employee or guest inputs their identifiable information via the chosen sign-in method, including who they are visiting, and answers any compliance questions to gain access.
2. Host notified
Once the guest is signed in, their host is automatically notified they are on-site and to make their way to the reception to greet the guest. Popular visitor management systems such as MRI OnLocation offer multiple ways for hosts to receive notifications such as SMS or email.
3. Guest sign-out
To ensure accurate record-keeping and knowing who is on-site in the event of an emergency it is essential guests signed out as they leave the location. Guest can be signed out via the same methods they signed in; receptionist, security guard, self-service kiosk, or QR code. It is as simple as entering their name and signing themselves out.
The power of data
Visitor management software is backed with valuable data. Through the sign-in/out process, each action is stored against the employee or guest record. The logging and storing of presence data, allows organisations to review, dive into insights, identify a security breach and easily generate compliance reporting.
Extra features
Touchless – Organisations looking to create an amazing customer experience via their visitor management system, can utilise touchless technology.
Pre-registration – Visitor pre-registration allows the host or software admin to send communications to the visitor before they arrive on-site. This provides an opportunity to perform a health check, ask specific questions that the organisation requires before gaining access and provide details to help the visitor with their visit.
Watchlists – Use watchlists to send alerts and be aware of those who need to be managed when arriving i.e. your VIPs or those whose access is permanently banned.
Zones – Split your organisation into zones, easily set who can gain access to each zone ensuring only those who are authorised gain access.
Badge printing – Automatically print guest passes at sign-in. A great way for your employees to easily confirm the guest has met on-site compliance and is allowed to be on-site.
Hybrid working – Visitor management software removes the guesswork when it comes to managing your hybrid workplace. Empower your employees to log when they will be working in the office and book the best desk for them to collaborate with their colleagues.
Deliveries – Free up your reception team by automating in-bound deliveries using your visitor management software. Deliveries are logged at the kiosk and employees are automatically notified they have a parcel or catering to collect.
What are the benefits of a visitor management system?
Managing and monitoring visitors’ safe and secure movement through buildings and worksites can be stressful. With the right visitor management software, you can ensure that all health and safety procedures are followed, provide a world-class customer experience, and be able to account for everyone in the event of an emergency.
Some of the key benefits of using a visitor management system include:
- Authorise and monitor guests and employees on-site
- Create a powerful first impression with multiple ways to sign-in
- Pre-screen to ensure only those who meet on-site requirements are able to gain access
- Improve front-line productivity
- Real-time visibility of who is on-site
- Ease workplace health and safety concerns
- Integrate with access control systems
- Manage risk with watchlist management
- Paperless alternative with less manual labour required to manage visitors
- Arrival notifications to hosts
- Workplace data insights and reporting
- Employees are automatically notified of deliveries
Protect your workplace and those in it with MRI OnLocation
MRI OnLocation helps organisations globally protect the people and places that power their workplace. Use our powerful visitor management software to track and manage everyone on-site.
Get a free trial of OnLocation today and strengthen the security of your workplace, instil confidence in employee safety, and protect intellectual property by taking control of guest access.
How power factor impacts your energy saving plan
What is the future of your real estate ecosystem?
When the pandemic struck two years ago, almost overnight, office workers switched to remote working and PropTech made the mainstream press, quickly becoming a business imperative. Once the real estate industry overcame the initial disruption and became comfortable mobilising teams to work remotely, attention turned to mitigating future costs and driving efficiencies, with the main objective to work smarter and drive profit.
Senior stakeholders across workplace, operations, and real estate management required a significant shift in how they effectively managed their teams. They began leaving their office doors ajar, encouraging regular feedback from their staff, with the entire workforce striving to come together as a unit with less focus on titles and hierarchy. “Do or die” was the attitude, and it brought about a positive culture, leaving everyone committed to the same cause.
Mission accomplished? Not quite. Whilst everyone may now be focussed on the same goals, the general technology behind these efforts is still not up to speed. Technology continues to move forward at a pace we have all grown used to (Facebook did not exist 20 years ago and now is closing in on two billion active users each day), so why should we as a real estate community not demand the same innovations?
The expectation of having the freedom of choice in ensuring your technology strategy stays aligned with your fluid real estate priorities is being met already, but it is key that your software provider works around you.
Business priorities change constantly – how can my workplace management solution be more flexible?
MRI Software have redefined the traditional IWMS concept to improve long-term, strategic property and portfolio management.
XWMS, our interoperable cloud-based ecosystem, gives you the power to decide how to optimise your business across operations, workplace, and real estate management, and to leverage certain functions or specific solutions suited to your needs.
Take control of your real estate portfolio with technology that enables you to incorporate third-party and partner solutions to create an ecosystem that scales as the business evolves.
Hybrid workforce is key – How do I build a strategy through the adoption of XWMS?
Planning and modifying your hybrid workspaces based on current compliance and trends is business critical, but how well do each of your business units communicate and have oversight on the process?
The XWMS approach provides an ecosystem for your space planners, finance team, and business leads to deliver.
- Space Planners understand the true cost of employees across various locations, considering utilisation of spaces.
- Finance have the ability to perform portfolio benchmarking across your real estate footprint with space utilisation metrics.
- Business leads are able to identify new opportunities to repurpose and sublet space to drive additional revenue streams for the business.
ESG planning is here to stay, but I don’t know where to start – Can XWMS help me?
There is a renewed focus on energy and resource allocation for safety and price control – we all have our part to play.
- Facilities Managers have a focus on sustainability and want to effortlessly collect and analyse key performance metrics (i.e., LEED, GRESP) to help with evaluating and maintaining certification levels.
- Lease Accounting teams are targeting cost savings and want to mitigate the likely growth of energy prices by having oversight on usage and diversifying energy types consumed.
- Business leads crave the strong position to review investment total cost of ownership and overall corporate positioning to determine ROI and access levels to different capital.
Can XWMS support the increased oversight into financial compliance?
New updates to lease compliance standards lead to increased need for coordination. Finance teams and C-suite members have IFRS 16 and ASC 842 fresh in their mind, and there are solutions to help them address that burden.
- Use AI-driven automation of data/onboarding entry processes to store critical leasing information for financial compliance.
- Find and correct inaccuracies and meet your obligations, including new lease accounting standards utilising the expertise from your software partner of choice.
- Business owners can then rely on the infrastructure in place to identify inaccurate costs of your leases through AI data validation, keeping your landlord accountable to the contract, often saving costs.
2022: Evolving technology and the year XWMS goes mainstream
With 5G networks still being deployed around the world and many areas of the globe still using 4G and even 3G networks, it seems a bit early to throw around the term 6G when considering technology, but it is not too soon to insist on an open and connected infrastructure that reduces your real estate cost and provides an environment for your organisation to drive profit.
By leveraging an interoperable cloud-based solution, your team can better serve the increasingly sophisticated and unique needs of corporate real estate, accounting, workplace and facilities workstreams.
Take control of the technology that manages your real estate portfolio by leveraging MRI’s suite of products, our dedicated partner solutions, or third-party products, and create an ecosystem that scales with your growing business. By taking a fluid approach to your lease, workplace, and operations management, you can use comprehensive technology solutions to make critical decisions for your real estate portfolio. Learn more about XWMS in this webinar.
The top 10 features of an energy management system
The changing landscape of retail real estate
The concept of ‘reinvention’ seems to be on everyone’s lips across many disciplines, many sectors, and many organisations, due to the global economy and business landscape evolving. Global challenges pile pressure on organisations to become more innovative and find ways to create and sustain success. ‘Reinventing the workplace’, ‘reinventing real estate’, and are we now firmly in the midst of the ‘reinvention of retail’?
Thus, retail real estate shouldn’t be any different. We aren’t just seeing the reinvention of retail from a customer experience perspective; we are also seeing it through new store designs as well as increased footfall. The future of the high street and shopping centres has been under the spotlight for quite some time, especially now that the pandemic has further impacted buying behaviours. This has piled the pressure on retailers and retail landlords to accelerate strategies and consider new and unforeseen scenarios.
Here are three key trends that are driving the reinvention of retail real estate.
Changing dynamics of lease terms
Long-term leases have been a staple of retail space in real estate for decades. Longer-term commitment in exchange for lower base rents, alongside more opportunities to review and negotiate costs across the lifecycle of the lease have been implemented through open market rent reviews. However, this seems to have become a thing of the past. At MRI Software, we’ve seen the average lease term for retail clients decrease rapidly to around five- or six-years with three-year renewals – terms that landlords might not have considered before the pandemic. This puts more importance on the initial lease contract negotiation with what is becoming a lifecycle. With little-to-no open market reviews, negotiation opportunities arrive only at the point of the renewal or break option.
New requirements for rent models
Turnover (sales or percentage) rents have been present in retail portfolios for many years, but the conversation with senior stakeholders within retailers has transitioned from “we try to avoid them” to now having a very defined strategy to push for all leases to be turnover based. Today, many C-suite executives at MRI retail clients are reluctant to execute lease contracts that do not include a turnover element. The market already seems more balanced in such a short space of time across larger portfolios where the split between turnover-based rent models and conventional rent models is becoming more aligned to 50/50, with the strategy to tip the turnover scales even further through effective negotiations. This seems to be an acceleration from the impact of the pandemic, with pressure on coverage during uncertainty. There also seems to be an increase in all-inclusive turnover rent models with business rates and service charge, from what more conventionally used to be base rent plus top-up, or pure turnover rent. Whilst all this can inevitably benefit both the landlord and occupier from a sustainability and successful partnership standpoint, it creates more work and strain on resources when it comes to producing accurate payment and collection schedules.
Increasing complexity of leases
The challenges of the last two years have significantly impacted real estate occupancy and utilisation, and as a result, we are now seeing pandemic provisions being built into agreements across the board. For retailers, we are seeing provisions covering potential store closures with examples such as the ability to claim up to three months’ rent back per year, or a 50/50 liability split during such a period. It’s also worth noting the language around suspension of payments which was a common theme in the early stages of 2020. If we rewind to those very first unprecedented national and global lockdowns, much of this became a power struggle between landlords and occupiers, with occupiers suspending payments indefinitely, whilst others struck temporary agreements for rent free periods and smoothing rents over smaller periods (i.e., UK quarterly temporarily moving to monthly). We also found occupiers and retailers acting into their own hands to preserve their business during such a difficult economic period. Another area of interest is how lease contracts, along with landlord and occupier relationships play out when the occupier is an essential retailer, who inevitably keeps their store doors open throughout lockdowns. Despite having their stores open to serve the communities, there will naturally be a huge drop in footfall and a potential drop in revenue, yet the clauses in typical pandemic provisions don’t necessarily cater out of the box to these retailers. As such, negotiated and compromised positions to cover these eventualities are key, given little to zero negotiation power in existing leases would potentially have a huge impact on the organisation’s long-term sustainability.
Reinventing the future of retail real estate through PropTech
The evolving nature of retail real estate continues to create more questions, more opportunity, along with a potential power shift, which presents one question: ”Is the occupier now holding the cards?”
One thing is for sure – retail’s unique position in the world of real estate continues to develop its own nuances and complexities across the board, and reinvention is paramount. More frequent renewals, more frequent expiries, more obligations, and more provisions that once didn’t exist now need to be tracked, managed, and negotiated. Stronger relationships and communication channels between landlords, local authorities, and occupiers are pivotal. Real estate certainly has secured its seat at the executive table in retail organisations, and now it requires the right technology tools to address these new challenges.
We have seen the acceleration of the real estate industry’s digital transformation, and delaying the adoption of technology and innovation is no longer an option. Successful retail occupiers will leverage a defined strategy together with flexible PropTech solutions to take on the future.
Beyond IWMS: 3 reasons you need an extensible workplace management solution
For nearly two decades, organizations have aspired to bring all their facilities, workplace, and real estate management functions into a single IWMS solution. While this concept is a great idea, in reality, very few companies have been able to achieve it.
The challenges are many – internal structures and alignment, outsourcing of major functions, and acquisitions that bring in new technologies to name a few. But the need for connected workplace management solutions has never been greater. Today’s workplace is more dynamic than at any other point in history, and achieving success hinges on having the right set of solutions in place to manage your real estate portfolio.
Fragmented tech stacks and bolted-on applications are no longer capable of adapting to new demands. Let’s take a look at three ways your workplace management solution might be falling short of today’s requirements.
1. Managing hybrid work
The pandemic was a catalyst for many organizations to implement hybrid work arrangements, marking a generational shift in the workplace. As companies adapt to managing a hybrid workplace, decisions regarding facilities and space have been elevated to a strategic level, which means workplace data and energy usage will be a significant consideration. Companies will require a more flexible workplace management solution to schedule and monitor space, track energy usage, and integrate the data together as part of a long-term corporate strategy.
2. Oversight into total portfolio costs
Today’s real estate organizations have a more urgent need to understand the cost of occupation, the demand for leased space, and how it impacts the broader business strategy. The amount of change that these departments are going through shouldn’t be underestimated.
As organizations shift to the hybrid workplace, they often find that they have excess capacity in their office portfolio. This excess capacity creates tremendous opportunity for cost savings, but how can you access and unlock those savings?
Real estate teams have been faced with transitioning to new lease accounting standards and adapting to the increased strategic importance of leases. Today, they are also tasked with collecting and assessing usage data and productivity insights from both the physical footprint and financial leases to quickly inform strategic decisions regarding the optimal size of leased portfolios and productivity goals.
Business has evolved, but many workplace management solutions have not. Traditional IWMS solutions were not designed to handle the shorter-term planning cycles that are taking place in the market today, and real estate and facilities teams require more flexible technology to meet business demands and manage leases at the portfolio level.
3. Employee health and safety
When Gartner created the term “IWMS” almost 20 years ago, the definition focused on meeting the needs of corporate IT, facilities, and real estate departments in a single database with little consideration if any for the employee experience. Today, employee health and safety are an integral part of workplace management, yet most IWMS solutions don’t offer the flexibility to integrate with presence management applications that can provide accountability and peace of mind.
Businesses are redefining the workplace, and it’s time to also redefine the solutions that help them manage it. Workplace management systems need to be scalable and able to integrate with emerging technologies and third-party providers.
XWMS: an open ecosystem for workplace management
To allow organizations to choose the tools that align best with the unique needs of their industry, MRI has coined the phrase “XWMS”: an extensible workplace management solution. We define it as an open ecosystem that enables integration with best-in-class technologies so organizations can strategically plan, manage and optimize real estate, facility and leasing portfolios – without limits.
The redefined XWMS offers an open and connected approach to help businesses accelerate digital transformation and adapt to new market demands through an extensive partner ecosystem and integration capabilities.
XWMS is the new IWMS
Today’s real estate and facilities management teams deserve a redefined approach to workplace management technology. See how XWMS can benefit your business in this webinar.