The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a dynamic shift in the corporate landscape, giving rise to a hybrid work environment. This blend of remote and on-site employees offers flexibility and introduces unique complexities in terms of workforce visibility, real estate utilization, employee wellbeing, and sustainability.
Cisco’s Innovation Labs presents Lumino, a proof-of-concept (PoC) user experience, showcasing how different Cisco technologies could potentially be brought together to manage the complexities of a hybrid workforce and create efficient smart building experiences. Lumino serves not only the workforce but also key stakeholder personas such as human resources, facilities, and estates management, offering a comprehensive perspective on the challenges and opportunities within the hybrid workforce and smart building landscape.
By collecting data from a number of different existing Cisco products, services, and solutions, Lumino’s dashboard aims to provide a comprehensive view of the workforce and building operations, inside and outside the traditional office environment. This is crucial in today’s hybrid work model where employees are distributed across various locations and buildings, housing a myriad of different systems and operations.
Unlocking Lumino’s Impact: A Case Study of Enhanced Workplace Management
Let’s explore Lumino’s potential impact with a fictional customer example, known as Lumicorp. Lumicorp, a global medical software company, employs over 10,000 people. Post-pandemic, around 25% of their workforce has transitioned to permanent remote work. Like lots of businesses today, Lumicorp is encouraging more people to come back into the office for regular collaboration and interactions.
Lumino provides Lumicorp with valuable insights into office occupancy, environmental data, and energy usage. These insights and data allow management to make informed decisions about staff levels, office usage patterns, and space utilization. Furthermore, Lumino provides insights into building operations and systems that contribute significantly to energy consumption and sustainability efforts, using the network to collect data from all the different systems and helping them to drive towards their net-zero goals.
For instance, Lumino can provide details on how the office is being used, the current office capacity and occupancy, enable proactive responses and strategies before problems arise, and energy utilization during different parts of the day and different parts of the building.
Actionable Insights: Streamlining Office Operations and Enhancing Energy Efficiency
A distinguishing feature of Lumino is the use of ‘actionable insights’, which provide a simplified way for non-IT users to take quick actions based on the data surfaced by the system. This would traditionally perhaps meant teams perhaps having to raise IT tickets or support requests on other teams, costing time, money and energy. However, through the use of ‘actionable insights’, Lumino simplifies these complex scenarios. We have all been in offices which leave on expensive lights or infrastructure without even being aware of it, or having any ability to enable people to take even the most basic of actions. For example, Lumino could highlight that many wireless access points are powered on 24/7, yet the building is unoccupied between 10pm and 7am. With a single click, Lumino can simplify the process of shutting down these devices, thereby saving energy and reducing costs.
Zooming in, Lumino can offer insights at a room level, providing specific environmental data and usage patterns. It can reveal that a meeting room with a capacity of 20 people is typically used by only an average of five at a time. This insight could lead to more efficient use of space, such as splitting the room into smaller meeting areas, thus reducing energy usage and increasing meeting room availability for other employees. Or, in another example, being able to reduce the costs of maintaining temperature and humidity levels within a comms server room simply by gathering multiple sensor data points and allowing more efficient use of HVAC systems. All of these use cases, and much more are demonstrated within Lumino.
Lumino’s Promise for the Future
In conclusion, this is just the beginning. With the Lumino PoC, Cisco’s Innovation Labs are showing just the start of what’s possible and how Cisco technologies can help companies address the challenges of a hybrid workforce and create sustainable, efficient smart buildings. By providing actionable insights, the Lumino PoC lights the way to a future where technology and innovation drive meaningful efficiencies across businesses and contribute to global sustainability efforts.
