Joan doesn’t pour coffee, but helps you focus your efforts
Keeping track of meeting room availability across an office, building, campus or venue is all too often a complete and utter nuisance; it eats up man hours and resources. Enter, electronic paper! It brings room labels into the modern age and Zemanta can testify to this …
The cycle of updating meeting room availability in an office seems unending (just like the line for coffee in the morning). Finding a designated person to edit the paper slips can be equally unnerving as the mad rush to complete them in time, setting aside design and readability. Printing out countless paper notes, delivering them to their designated, often scattered locations, attaching them to the right doors, and spotting the typo just as you’ve managed to slip them in — that is no longer necessary.
It’s nothing if not a waste of employee time: a single misprint or misunderstanding results in the vicious paper merry-go-round to start up again.
And it’s not just the office manager who’s faced with the perils of analogue — the paper sign and user patience alike will be tried with outdated information or the lack of it; you decide which is worse.
Labels fall off doors, get crammed with scrawled handwriting, and sport the occasional attractive frayed edge and faded print, which all leave a bad impression.
We helped Zemanta sort out the confusion of conference room booking by providing them with Joan, an office productivity gadget we were developing.
“It would have been funny if it didn’t happen so often”
For Zemanta, a content demand-side platform provider, meeting room mishaps were reality. Amid all the confusion of conference room booking, they often found themselves double-booked or interrupted during meetings in their Ljubljana office.
“It would have been funny if it didn’t happen so often: people barging into occupied rooms or pacing outside the door, unsure if the room was booked or not. All this just because people forgot to update the room status or were running a couple of minutes late and somebody else took over the space assuming the room was free”, said Martina Ring, Zemanta’s Office Manager.
The result was a tiresome process of clearing up who reserved the room and when, followed by a few side glances, updating the room status both online and on the door notice, wasting a lot of time, and rushing to get through the meeting before vacating the room.
We assisted Zemanta by providing them with Joan Meeting Room Assistant in the hopes it would help them solve the daily meeting room Game of Thrones.
Joan to the rescue!
Joan was designed to resolve the exact issues Zemanta was experiencing and bring room reservations into the modern age. The funky digital door label marks conference room vacancy statuses seconds after the meeting or event has been entered into the online calendar or reserved on the spot.
Joan’s electronic-paper display marks conference room vacancy statuses, seamlessly integrates with existing scheduling software and features extremely long battery autonomy without tangled wires.
But Zemanta found the best part of Joan the software’s seamless integration of the e-paper labels and existing online calendars. With Joan you don’t need any additional signage software or complex integrations; the label fits your company’s existing scheduling software like a glove.
A stitch in time
Joan is functional in minutes after unboxing. There is no need to train staff or allocate resources to system integration, and that is exactly how room labeling should work. It’s as simple as that.
Joan leaves the end user in no doubt as to room vacancy status. It eliminates any possibility of pesky interruptions at meetings and dispels all concerns as to when the space will become available.
Most importantly, Joan eliminates the need for the venue operator to replace room availability notices one by one, with the employees updating conference room statuses from the comfort of their laptops or smartphones, or even on the spot, at the meeting room door. This means less time for administrative fuss, which makes everybody happy, plus there’s more time for actual work.
Zemanta discovered this as well: “By using Joan we could focus our efforts on what is truly important, our clients and projects, instead of wasting it on office management”, commented Ring.
Updating meeting room availability on paper is a waste of employee time. It’s often confusing and always annoying. Save time and increase efficiency by employing Joan Meeting Room Assistant.
Originally published at getjoan.com on September 4, 2015.
