IoT enhanced space booking with Taitori

Read how Haltian's IoT solutions makes space booking simple and easy with Taitori
Smart office: man using IoT room booking

The global smart office market size was valued at 31.37 billion dollars in 2020 and is projected to reach 90.63 billion by 2030, a development that has been accelerated by Covid-19 and the need for more digitized space monitoring solutions and increased hygiene and cleaning.

Taitori is a Finnish smart office company that provides new kinds of solutions for easier management and booking of premises and for smoother reporting. Taitori’s objective is that people always have just the right amount of space for various encounters. Taitori’s complete smart office solutions include space and workstations booking, catering orders, visitor management, info screens, and space usage analysis and reports. In short, Taitori aims to be the category king of smart offices and work in collaboration with Haltian’s Thingsee IoT solution to achieve this goal.

Challenge

Demand for wireless IoT solutions

In the smart building and smart office sectors, the past few years have seen a rise in demand for wireless sensor solutions, especially in workstation occupancy monitoring.

Taitori has a background of hardware design themselves, but they wanted to focus their operations on their smart office platform that includes the doorpost info screens and software. This meant that they needed to find a reliable IoT solution partner with a ready, off-the-shelf sensor solution that would fit their demands: wireless, battery-powered devices with long battery lives for visitor counting and occupancy monitoring.

Another challenge was the long reporting intervals many available occupancy monitoring solutions offered: a good smart office solution requires real-time occupancy information so that people can see and reserve free spaces even on a moments’ notice.

“If a phone booth has a 10-minute delay in its occupancy information that means that the booth can be unnecessarily ‘occupied’ for those 10 minutes. That’s an entire call someone could have had”.

Perttu Ahvenainen, Taitori Oy

Solution

Wireless occupancy monitoring devices

The occupancy monitoring is done with wireless Haltian Thingsee PRESENCE sensor devices. The sensors are placed on workstations, phone booths and other meeting spaces where they report the occupancy with a very short interval through Thingsee GATEWAY devices and the entire solution is integrated to Taitori’s smart office platform, where the users can see the occupancy information, book spaces, and further analyze the data for better space usage. The gateways relay the data with inbuilt global cellular connectivity, which makes the installation simple and helps Taitori to scale their solution easily. The sensor data is made available through Thingsee OPERATIONS CLOUD, which also acts as an interface for device management. There are many ways to access sensor data, MQTT being the most used one. Haltian support team also provides service levels ensuring high quality of service.

The Wirepas mesh connectivity between the Haltian Thingsee devices was another factor in why Taitori chose Haltian as their partner: Haltian sensors could ‘free’ the occupancy of a phone booth in a minute, whereas the competitor’s solution did in 15 minutes. Mesh connectivity offers a reliable way to relay data from the sensors to Taitori’s application, as offices are often full of Bluetooth and WiFi devices that can set a demanding environment to some IoT devices.

Another important thing for Taitori has been the ability to manage the settings of the sensor devices themselves: not all sensors need the same reporting settings and detection sensitivity, so it is important for the customer to be able to manage the devices remotely themselves.

IoT for smart office meeting room booking system
Taitori smart office solutions include meeting room booking system and info screens

Results

Smart offices easy and fast

The occupancy monitoring for meeting rooms, phone booths and workstations makes the use of space and assets much more efficiently.

Taitori’s smart office customers include many companies and enterprises whose offices and meeting rooms have been made smart. In addition, Taitori co-operates in Haltian Empathic Building smart building solution.

Haltian sensors were first taken into use at Taitori’s own office. Big customer installations have been made, and are being made as we speak. Taitori has been particularly impressed with Haltian’s quick delivery times even during the COVID-19 crisis.

The installation has also been quick and simple when the technicians have been able to use Taitori’s installation system together with the Haltian IoT sensors.

Taitori believes that even though office spaces are changing and the number of people working in offices might decrease, the need to invest in technology increases with hybrid working models:

“Now we can have limits for space usage that can automatically be seen from the smart office platform. You don’t have to make an unnecessary trip to the office just to see that all the workspaces are already taken when the information is easily available remotely. Smart office technologies make new ways of working possible.”

 

We want to work with Haltian. We value Finnish expertise and know-how, and that the Haltian devices are designed and made in Finland. Second, we hope to create a smart office ecosystem together with Haltian that will take over the world with Finnish innovation

Perttu Ahvenainen, Partner & Head of Sales and Marketing at Taitori Oy

Interested in how Haltian IoT sensors can help your business?