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On 25th September, 2000 QC Data was celebrating. Despite being a newcomer to the UK utilities scene, we had overcome stiff competition and Northern Powergrid awarded us a multi-year outsource contract to manage all of the data that related to their distribution assets. It was one of earliest UK successes and it cemented our arrival.

Today, we have every cause to be celebrating again – perhaps more so. Because exactly 15 years on, our relationship with our customer continues to go from strength to strength; and through the significant evolution the electricity industry has seen during that time, QC Data has remained a constant support to Northern Powergrid having been re-awarded our contract on two further occasions following competitive procurement processes.

The strength of our relationship with Northern Powergrid and their choice to continue to select QC Data as their service partner is, without question, largely thanks to the hard-work and dedication of our operational team. They have every reason to celebrate 15 years of success and we’re delighted to celebrate with them.

The office-based, 9-5 workforce is a thing of the past. Remote working is on the rise with 1 in 5 of us working away from the office every day. The rest of the mobile workforce is reported as spending less than 60% of their working week in ‘their’ office. Under-utilized office space is becoming an increasingly costly challenge.

Hot-desking and hoteling offer one solution, allowing workers to use the office as and when they need to without the business paying for a permanently allocated space for everyone. And open plan spaces, designed to fit more into less space, allow costs to be cut further. Even though a reported 70% of offices have adopted this style, it gets terrible press with claims that productivity drops due to increased noise and distraction; workforces become demotivated as a result of sharing space; and sickness is 62% higher in employees regularly working in open plan buildings. So should you return to individual assigned offices for everyone in the hope that employees with personal space, privacy and better health will be sufficiently productive to compensate for the cost of the additional and under-utilized space?

Not necessarily. What is becoming alarmingly apparent in this debate is the lack of consideration given to which workplace design works best in the context of the business using it. A recent FMJ article claims that one reason for poor utilization statistics is a tendency to follow a ‘data-less’ approach to design; starting with what people want, not what the business needs (http://www.fmj.co.uk/offices-waste-space-time/).

If you want to achieve effective workplace design that optimizes space utilization, reduces property costs and doesn’t compromise productivity, we recommend putting industry trends aside and looking within your own organization for answers. Take time to understand your current occupancy and space utilization stats and identify what you aim to achieve through a design change. Determine what your business needs from your workers and what your workers need from you. Think about the most productive way of arranging your workforce in the space available to you, and where best to place the equipment they need to be effective. Analyze your business’ work type, patterns and workforce preferences and understand that one design style may not suit everyone all of the time. You might just find that you can offer hot-desking and hoteling in a combination of open plan space, private offices and collaboration rooms, all while still encouraging a flexible workforce, maximizing productivity, reducing your office space and saving money!

Today is World FM Day and the theme for 2014 is ‘Connected FM, Connected World – Global Knowledge Sharing’

Our first thought when considering a blog to mark the occasion was to look to the software and systems the FM industry relies on to achieve that connection and share their knowledge, but it occurred to us that lying beneath the systems there is a component far more fundamental to the success of any FM  technology.

Data

With property accounting for the second largest cost for businesses, best case scenario would be for property and FM teams to have their data in order and be confident in their analysis; however this is typically not the case. Organizations are plagued by silos of local information in any number of formats and held in a range of incompatible systems that hasn’t been subjected to regular validation or update. How can you understand the true cost of your property and asset portfolio without accurate data to base to assessment on? The answer: you can’t!

Without accurate and reliable base data, the information and the analytics derived from any CAFM or IWMS software is compromised. If your FM strategy and decisions aren’t delivering the results you were expecting, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and assess the condition of the data you are relying on.

Organizations with accurate facilities and property data report:

• Improved workforce efficiency
• Greater ROI on technology investments
• Better VFM from their property portfolio
• An increased bottom line

So challenge yourself on World FM Day to question the integrity of your data.  Ask if your data is standing in the way of your Ability to achieve: Connected FM, Connected World – Global Knowledge Sharing.

Click here find out how QC Data can help you to assess, validate and improve your property data.

The end of Q1 brought with it cause for celebration here at QC Data. We had high expectations of ourselves for 2014 and as we reflect on the past 3 months, it’s safe to say we are off to a flying start!

Our Intelligent Floor Plan^TM is making waves; we have secured significant new contracts across all of our market sectors; and we have welcomed new people and increased our property portfolio to support our growth. Here are our highlights:

Experienced Product Manager Tim Gallardo joined our team and is leading the development and management of our Intelligent Floor Plan^TM software.

Intelligent Floor Plan^TM V2.0 was released to the market with a fantastic response from our users. Our range of exciting new features and enhancements further improves our customers’ abilities to manage their office space and assets.

Joining our customer-base for Intelligent Floor Plan^TM are several new customers in the software and healthcare financial industries, including SaaS company Ping Identity and medical data processing company MedARx.

The award of 2 year extensions to our long term Data Management contracts with UK utilities giants Northern Powergrid and UK Power Networks puts our relationships with both companies at 10+ years. In the US we built on our 15+ year relationship with AT&T with the award of additional work under our long standing telecommunications engineering and data services contracts.

And finally, our new, larger premises in Calgary are supporting our growth and are proving an ideal base for us as we introduce the Intelligent Floor Plan^TM to markets in Western Canada.

As you can see, we have been busy and we look forward to more exciting progress and sharing our continuing growth and successes with you as the year unfolds.

The Intelligent Floor Plan™ is a graphical space and occupancy planning tool designed to help you manage your company’s office space, occupancy, assets and people more effectively. Version 2.0 is now available and comes with some great new features designed to let you and your business:

Be Mobile

The Intelligent Floor Plan™ is a web-based platform and is now available on any device. You can have as many users and viewers as you need working on your data anytime, anywhere making it the perfect tool for supporting your mobile workforce.

Be efficient 

Full functionality on your mobile devices means that now you can make edits on the fly and everyone has real time data literally at their fingertips! Version 2.0 will further improve you response times and increase workforce productivity giving you a competitive edge.

Be Proactive 

Make sure your office space continues to support effective working in the face of your changing requirements. Space Designer is new for Version 2.0 and helps you plan your space, create what-if scenarios and test your theories inside the application to determine what works best for your company before you invest in redesign and refurbishments.

Be Informed

Get real time analytics about your space use, asset and occupancy by generating dashboards, reports and charts via our redesigned user interface and spatial visualizations to help you quickly understand your data. In Version 2.0 your information will be even easier to interpret and analyze to help you find ways to reduce costs, improve productivity and plan for the future.

Be supported 

Align the Intelligent Floor Plan™ to your business goals by having it configured to your needs. It is offered as Software as a Service and because we handle the software upgrades you don’t have to, so you are always working with the latest and greatest version. It’s easy to use and you will benefit from dedicated support customer support, whenever you need it.

The Intelligent Floor Plan™ is the simple way to make your job easier by giving you more time for the things that matter. Not using it yet?

Request a demo today to find out how it could benefit your business and deliver huge cost savings…

To find out more click on the link below…

QC Data is pleased  to announce a 2 year extension to our current contract for the provision of data management services with UK Power Networks, one of the UK’s leading electricity distribution network operators. QC Data has been working with UK Power Networks (previously EDF Energy Networks) for more than a decade. This latest agreement will enable us to continue to provide critical data-centric support to UK Power Networks during a dynamic period in the evolution of electricity networks.

We have relocated QC Data Ltd.’s Canadian head office to new premises in the prime downtown core of Calgary. Our new space will serve as QC Data’s central point for our sales operations for the Western Canadian market as we take steps towards bringing our Intelligent Floor Plan application into the Canadian property management sector. It is an ideal size, location and design to support hoteling for our mobile workforce and we are pleased to be settling in to our new space.

About QC Data’s Intelligent Floor Plan™

The Intelligent Floor Plan is a web-based space and occupancy management application, designed to facilitate effective real estate portfolio management by enabling users to work with their space data in a graphical environment.

Watch a short video to find out more: https://www.qcdata.com/movies/index.html

Facility and space management software applications are moving to the cloud, and its revolutionizing property portfolio management.

A world away from the constraints and expense of locally installed software packages, cloud-based solutions are fully managed and hosted on-line. They are scalable, flexible and, because they are sold ‘on-demand’, significantly more affordable. If they aren’t reasons enough to go the cloud-based Software as a Service way for your facilities and space management, it also offers:

A cap-ex-free solution

There are no infrastructure requirements and in effect, you rent rather than buy the software so there is no capital expenditure and typically, start-up costs are comparatively little. This model opens the doors for organizations who have previously been unable to justify the spend on facilities and space management software, and provides access to a valuable tool set which puts them on a level playing field with their competitors, whatever their size or financial position.

A maintenance-free approach

Cloud-based applications are managed by their provider. They take care of server maintenance and security updates removing the burden and cost from your IT group. And upgrades are delivered seamlessly without any onus on you to do anything so you can be sure you are working with the latest software version and benefitting from new features as they appear.

An added layer of data security

Because cloud-based applications mean that an organization’s data is held beyond their IT networks, they offer a much faster route to disaster recovery. Even under normal conditions, cloud based apps have a significantly reduced impact on a company’s IT group.

A more productive workforce

Cloud applications better satisfy the needs of an increasingly dynamic and mobile workforce. Providing there is an internet connection they can be accessed via secure logins anywhere in the world and new technologies such as HTML5 make them available on both desktop and mobile device. The result is a workforce who can work flexibly anywhere, anytime and collaborate remotely without the travel, time, cost and restrictions associated with working via locally installed packages.

A universally usable tool

Historically, software in this arena has relied on users’ CAD and architectural skills, automatically limiting the number of employees within an organization able to use it. One of the key features of cloud computing is wider accessibility so it stands to reason providers want to make them easier to use! Our Intelligent Floor Plan is graphics driven and has no reliance on CAD or other specialist technology packages so if a user is familiar with standard computing packages they will require minimal training to be up and running. It provides a single source of information accessible to all departments across your organization that enables joined up thinking and streamlined workflows.

The bottom line is that cloud-based facilities and space management apps increase workforce and operational efficiencies, and improve cash flow. In a recent study, Gartner projected that by 2016 36% of all data will be stored in the cloud. Make 2014 the year for your company to reap the benefits of cloud-based facilities and space management. To find out more about how this approach could work for you, click the link below:

Following an extremely successful audit at our site in Scotland last week, QC Data has been awarded ongoing accreditation to Achilles Verify under category B2 achieving our highest results since our initial accreditation in 2008. Our scores of 100% for quality, 97% for environmental management and 96% for health and safety are a credit to the team and the improvement in comparison to the previous year’s scores is reflective of our ongoing commitment to refine our policies and working practices.

‘After five years of continuous improvement and exemplary results I was ready to acknowledge that our performance had probably reached its peak – this year’s outcomes have delighted everyone – all credit to the team in Scotland and the outstanding support they have received from our SHE and QM specialists.’ says Ian Wainwright, Managing Director UK and Ireland.

Achilles Verify is an assessment scheme designed to shorten the procurement cycle by providing an assurance that accredited companies have demonstrated comprehensive and effective health, safety, environmental and quality management systems and practices. Accreditation to the scheme is a pre-requisite for many UK utility and engineering companies and our latest award means our customer base can continue to engage QC Data with confidence.

Welcome to the new qcdata.com. We designed the website with our new Intelligent Infrastructure branding in mind; and we think the new content, design, and functionality make it easy to see how the services we offer compliment the industries we serve.

We have worked hard to make the site user-friendly and easy to navigate, so take a look and see how QC Data can help you meet all your infrastructure data needs.

Also, we have plenty more Intelligent Information to come, so check back often and don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.