A Case Study

"Meeting" challenges at MCI

Organisations need to maximise the utilisation of their resources and create the most effective usage of them. Efficiently harnessing these assets – be they people, equipment, or facilities – is essential to increasing competitive advantage and being successful in business.

Anyone who has worked in an organisation with even a modest infrastructure – never mind a large corporation – will have suffered the problems and associated frustrations of booking a conference room for a meeting: not being able to quickly find what rooms are available; uncertainty as to what equipment is in the room, or if it can be booked; having to use a separate process to organise in-room refreshments or catering.

And on the day of the meeting, the problems continue: the room is double booked; time is wasted waiting for room layout changes or equipment set-up; or the catering doesn’t turn up. These are typical examples that happen every hour of every day in companies all over the country.

It is a fact of life that meetings dominate business life in the UK today, with the typical manager spending up to one-third of each business day in meetings, in total attending nearly 60 a month – so it is easy to see how just a few minutes wasted each week can mount up, costing businesses £1000s in lost employee time.

MCI’s headache

MCI is a global leader in business communications. Its mission is to make doing business more efficient for its customers, so it is not surprising that its own internal systems and processes are expected to offer exceptional support to its employees. A critical part of this are the conference and meeting room services that allow MCI staff to carry out their daily tasks with the minimum difficulty and the maximum efficiency.

Across Europe today, MCI employs thousands of people. Indeed, it has over 90 meeting, conference and training rooms spread over 11 sites in the UK and Ireland alone, with a similar number in its continental European locations. With such a large number of people, rooms, and locations, there is a clear need for a well-organised and efficient system that allows employees to book rooms quickly and effectively.

Michele Guichard is MCI’s Facilities Project and System Advisor in the UK: “You can imagine the administrative workload that is generated by our employees wanting to book rooms, equipment, and catering. In the old system we used until recently, we needed a dedicated team of 4 people in the UK just to manage these bookings and the equipment in them.”

Ubiquitous, but not honed

However, Michele was becoming increasingly aware that the room booking system they were using had its problems. “We originally used the Calendar function in Outlook™ as the booking system, but found it was not suitable for the amount of bookings being done on a daily basis, usually over 100.

When we started to open the larger sites, more complex bookings were being requested, including the booking of pool equipment (such as projectors) and we found that the old system couldn’t cope, with bookings being lost and duplicated. In the end, to ensure accuracy, we had to keep a paper version of the bookings in addition to the electronic system. The whole process became extremely slow.”

Anyone wanting to make a room booking would email the Conference Room Booking team with his or her requirements. The team would search the Outlook™ calendars for room availability and once a suitable room was found, would book it. They would then confirm the room details by return email. With the number of requests, and the extremely slow system not showing real-time room status, the process could take approximately 2 hours for each request.

More delays were created if a room was shown as free but was actually being processed by another member of the team – a situation that arose frequently. The whole booking process then had to start all over again. “We obviously reacted quickly to urgent requests for same-day bookings, but the biggest bane was that the system was so slow. In the end it was quicker to look through the paper copy to react to urgent room requests,” said Michele.

“But doing urgent searches for available rooms only delayed the turn-around time for normal bookings even more. And the urgent requests also added to the pressure on the staff responsible for equipment set-up: they had to drop everything and rush around to get those rooms ready.”

With the team’s workload being increased by the problems with the system, it was not surprising that many meetings started late. Michele commented, “People could waste up to 20 minutes trying to get a meeting started, especially if a large meeting had been double booked and an alternative room had to be found. Even though most bookings ran smoothly, it was these recurring problems of the system and double bookings that would have the largest impact on both our Conference Room Booking team and our customers.”

This might not seem too bad, but when you realise what that means for a company with thousands of staff, the wasted time sitting around waiting for, say, an overhead projector to be delivered – or the coffee to turn up – multiplies into a huge issue.

To make matters worse, given that the booking team were spending time trying to find vacant rooms at short notice, it was discovered that some people were booking a room in advance and then not cancelling when it was no longer required. So rooms were sitting unused when the team were desperate to find an empty one.

The hunt was on

The conference room team did everything they could to alleviate these problems, and whilst the employees generally accepted the slow and unreliable process without too much complaint, Michele resolved to find a solution that would deliver a superior service level to her customers – the employees.

The first step was to try and fix the current system. “Our IT Department tried to rectify the problems with Outlook™, but eventually suggested looking for a software package that could do the job.” So Michele, together with a team dedicated to the project, embarked on a search to find the right solution for MCI’s needs.

“One of our main criteria, apart from being user-friendly, was the ability to book both equipment and catering at the same time as reserving a room. But all of the room booking systems I looked at seemed designed for managing hotel rooms, requiring a centralised booking team to operate, and often having many separate stages to go through. I wanted a system that had everything on one screen, and that worked in real-time. If a user needed to make a booking, they would be able to see what was available and get confirmation of everything they’d booked – there and then.”

Michele also wanted a solution that was fully automated and could easily be used by everyone in the company via their PC. This was to empower individual users to make their own bookings, allowing the Conference Room Booking team to concentrate on delivering a second-to-none service to their customers.

A further benefit of individual employees making their own bookings would be that support departments such as Facilities could focus on their core tasks, such as setting rooms up, rather than be distracted by dealing with booking administration. The fully automated ‘self-service’ room booking system that Michele was seeking made perfect sense.

After some time searching, it became apparent that “there was nothing functionally that matched what I wanted,” said Michele. It was then that the IT department suggested using Vizola Technology, a company specialising in developing web applications for business. “We started to discuss our requirements with Vizola and they proposed a solution that seemed to fit the bill.”

This was for a web-based application that allowed a user to search in real-time for available room facilities, to book everything at once including catering and equipment, but most of all, was easy to use. Seamless integration into the corporate intranet was also a critical element.

 CORA meets the need

Vizola’s CORA (Collaborative On-line Reservation Application) system empowers all authorised users to make and manage their own bookings. A user simply clicks an icon on the intranet home page and minutes later they’ve made a room booking.

The system was designed to run ‘out-of-the-box’ in the standard IT environment used by most companies today without special requirements or set-up. For instance the inputting of meeting room names, equipment, and catering details to personalise the system for any company environment is carried out by Facilities personnel recognised as ‘super-user’ by the system: it doesn’t need the IT department to configure it.

The system is unlimited in the numbers of users and locations that can use it, although of course the IT department can control access to the application as required. “Once set-up, it’s a low maintenance product,” said Michele.

Amongst other features that many users find very useful is the ability to go back and amend a room booking at any time before the meeting, and a feature that overcomes the ‘I forgot to cancel’ syndrome. “48 hours before the meeting’s scheduled time, the system automatically sends an email to the person who made the booking asking them if they still require the room. If they don’t, they click on a link in the email and the booking is automatically cancelled. This is a great feature as it allows users to cancel their meeting room at a click of a button, allowing the room to be made available to other users,” said Michele.

The integrated reporting features also bring major benefits to MCI. “We can run reports on the room utilisation,” she noted. This helps optimise the use of meeting rooms and equipment, and to plan for future expansion. Another feature is that a schedule ‘day-to-view’ report can be printed out at the start of the day to be posted outside each room so that anyone can immediately see room usage for that day.

MCI are currently using the system in their UK and Ireland locations, with a rollout to the rest of Europe being planned. One interesting anecdote is that during the system evaluation phase, the Conference Room Booking team were given the system to use as their new ‘booking tool’, replacing Outlook™. Through word-of-mouth, more and more employees heard of the new system and without any formal training just started to use it themselves, bypassing the booking team. At the end of the evaluation phase, over 300 employees in the UK and Ireland were using the system to make their own bookings!

“It just seemed to take on a life of its own,” commented Michele. “The employees find it very easy-to-use and they say it’s a pleasure to work on. The reaction has been a positive one and people have taken to it quickly. The fact that a normal user doesn’t have to be trained is a major advantage. The best feature is being able to search on a specific day for a meeting room. If a room is not available, the system will bring up alternative rooms that are available for that day, giving users the ability to select another suitable room and book it straight away with the option to make changes to the booking when required.”

In the near future MCI see a major benefit to employees being able to book meeting rooms anywhere within Europe from their own PC. “If you click on a room name, it will bring up the details together with a description and equipment of the room, with a link to layout plans. The average time to book a room now less than 5 minutes.”

With the plan for multi-national rollout across Europe in the coming months, Michele is very pleased so far. “One of the key aspects was the ability to customise the system for our particular requirements. It’s very adaptable, and Vizola were very responsive to our needs, to the extent that the system meets all our requirements and specifications.”

Michele concluded: “It’s a fabulous system and we love it. It’s going to save everyone so much time. We are already seeing the benefits of the system.”

 About MCI

MCI, Inc. is a pre-eminent global communications provider for the digital generation, operating in more than 65 countries. With one of the most expansive, wholly-owned IP networks in the world, MCI provides innovative data and Internet services for businesses to communicate in today’s market. In April 2002, MCI launched The Neighbourhood built by MCI – the industry’s first truly any-distance, all-inclusive local and long-distance offering to consumers. For more information, go to http://www.MCI.com.

About Vizola

Vizola Technology Ltd., based near Oxford in the UK, is a leading developer of business solutions technology. Founded in 1997, the company has delivered solutions in the fields of CRM, PDM, MRP and factory systems. Vizola’s focus is on creating web service products deployed over Intranet, Extranet or World Wide Web. Further information can be found on their web site: www.vizola.com

About CORA

CORA is a secure, robust, browser-accessed resource scheduling system that is scalable to thousands of users - from desktop to multi-time zone, multi-location global enterprise. In use with the largest of multi-national companies, the system empowers users, eliminates double bookings and minimises administrative overhead. It has comprehensive support for bookings of any resource from conference rooms to hot-desks, ordering of catering or other facilities, requires no user training, and has interoperability with standard e-mail. CORA utilises Microsoft (IE/ASP/IIS/SQL Server) and Vizola BCA (Business Components Architecture) technologies.

™ All trademarks acknowledged to their respective owners.