What Are Our Partners Doing in the Netherlands?

More Students, Increased Capacity, Same Space

It’s hard to get into a good university. Even qualified students are turned away because there’s not enough space on campus. Cisco Solution Partner Lone Rooftop is changing that. Wageningen University in the Netherlands is educating more students by increasing the classroom capacity they have by 15% using data analytics. It’s working so well that Lone Rooftop is now in 50% of the universities in Holland. And they’re in talks with dozens more in other parts of Europe.

Lone Rooftop says…

For 11 years, the students at Wageningen University have voted it the best in the Netherlands. Every day, over 16,500 people flood the campus. It’s become so popular that they had a big challenge to accommodate all students in the available classroom space.

Some classes were too full but many classrooms remained under-utilized – a classroom of 80 people might only have an average of 20 students or less attending. And other classrooms were reserved but remained empty because the class, for various reasons, didn’t take place, called a no-show. It was difficult to assign rooms to fit class size and to limit the number of no-shows.

That’s when they met us at Lone Rooftop. Back then, we were still small – our name comes from the rooftop terrace we worked from before we had an office. And we’d just started using Wi-Fi to figure out how many people were in a building at a given time.

We spent a few weeks getting our Position Intelligence Engine (PIE) up and running all over campus. It uses the university’s existing Cisco Wi-Fi network to count the people in a room. Because it only listens to signals, it doesn’t clog up the bandwidth. And it’s anonymous, so everybody’s private data stays private.

The results are even better than we’d imagined. The timetabling team can see at a glance which rooms are being used and how full they are. So, they can schedule 15% more classes. And as an unexpected bonus, they’re now working on making cleaning truly smart because they know which rooms are used and which ones are empty. And, we’re in the process of making their energy system adaptive based on the real time and predictive occupancy metrics we provide their BMS, and we’re going to launch many other Intelligent Campus apps based on the PIE data.

The best bit for us? Wageningen have told their friends about Lone Rooftop. Our PIE technology is now in use in over half of all universities s in the Netherlands and we’re expanding into other education institutions across Europe.

Thanks, Lone Rooftop! And we’re glad you spent last week with us at Cisco Live Berlin.

The story doesn’t stop there.

More information on Lone Rooftop lonerooftop.com

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