Wedlake Bell finds ideal management scheduling system in NFS' Rendezvous Workspace
Wedlake Bell LLP is a leading London law firm that provides a full service to corporate and private clients in the UK and internationally. The company has a long history and a modern approach, and adopts a style that is friendly, proactive, professional, and direct.
Wedlake Bell's culture encourages creative
thinking, and its structure allows information and
ideas to flow freely around the firm. A healthy
work-life balance is encouraged because the company
understands that relaxed, fulfilled people bring a
positive attitude to their work.
The law firm aims to be environmentally friendly
and commits to best practice in environmental
management, so has introduced a number of
initiatives and schemes to support the development
of these objectives. These include: planning the
journeys of partners and staff to minimize fuel
useage - encouraging video conferencing where
appropriate; recycling all paper, plastics, glass,
and aluminium/steel cans, as well as Waste
Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and
hazardous waste; switching off lights, printers,
computers, and screens when not required; and
producing documents electronically, as opposed to
paper-based, whenever possible.
Booking Meeting Rooms in the Traditional Way
Wedlake Bell have a total of ten meeting rooms at their offices in Holborn, London. The booking process followed the traditional approach for many firms of a similar size, room bookings being managed by the reception team. The process utilizes a manual diary held at reception, with staff members needing a meeting room either calling or emailing the reception to request a suitable room. Catering and items like projectors are also then booked in the same manner, with the reception team taking control of room allocation and also the many changes that could be required when organizing a meeting.
This process is time-consuming, particularly when
reception have a busy period handling visitors and
other tasks. In addition, a manual process is prone
to error, taking even more time to address and also
potentially having an impact on the service to the
client and internal staff members.
The Solution now being Adopted by Wedlake Bell
 Linda
Webster, Head of IT at Wedlake Bell, had been
looking to find a cost-effective facility scheduling
solution to improve room bookings for some time. One
of her key considerations was simplicity for the
user community, without going down the road of a
free-for-all in terms of booking rooms and
resources. The solution selected was Rendezvous
Workspace, an Outlook-based room and resource
scheduling system released by NFS in 2009.
Linda was one of the early adopters of the
Rendezvous Workspace solution, having agreed to
participate in the beta test programme. This
provided the opportunity for Linda to influence the
workflow of the solution - particularly the Outlook
scheduling experience - and NFS were able to take on
board valuable customer feedback at an early stage
in the release program.
 "The
ability for our staff to make a room availability
enquiry from within Outlook and to also request or
book a meeting room and resources simply and
efficiently will help with providing a better
service to our team and also reduce the workload on
reception," comments Linda.
"We have been working with the NFS Development team to simplify/improve the booking process for the Outlook user and we are now looking forward to releasing Workspace to our Private Client team, as they make a considerable number of room bookings, many involving catering and other resources."
Linda continues by saying that Wedlake Bell's plan
is to then roll out the solution firm wide, giving
all staff the ability to make room bookings from
Outlook, with seamless updating of Outlook
Calendars.
The Way Forward
Apart from the simplicity of being able to book from
Outlook, Wedlake Bell also expect to secure a number
of other benefits, for example, accurate information
on room availability and utilization, the potential
to extend the Workspace solution to manage other
resources like Hot Desks in future, and 'granular'
level control of room booking processes.
In addition to saving administrative time, an
Outlook based booking system like Workspace will
help streamline booking processes, allow better
control of limited inventory items, projectors for
example, and make it easier to for all concerned
when it comes to things like late meeting-change
notifications.
"Rendezvous Workspace has powerful facilities to handle meeting-change notification in a very flexible manner, so being made aware of a last-minute time or location change for that important client meeting, delivered to your mobile device, will be the norm going forward," comments Luis De Souza, CEO of NFS Hospitality.
"We
are also releasing some ‘visual’ tools to improve
management of the facility, for example,
self-service reception kiosks and management
dashboards, helping our clients deliver a better and
greener client experience," concludes De Souza. |
