What if you could respond rapidly to your clients, early in their process, to provide test fit solutions that allowed them to choose the best spaces for their companies? What if you could also give them budgetary furniture numbers before engaging in the lengthy specification process? What if you could use resources that allowed you to be more than just a broker finding space for your clients, but gave you the tools to be a valuable partner in helping them realize the ideal fit for the way that their employees work?
For decades, CFI Workspace has been partnering with commercial real estate professionals in the greater Philadelphia area to be just this resource. We have been able to provide budgetary numbers and take-offs of spaces to help CRE pros give their clients a better idea of how they will work in the locations they're showing them, providing a "value add" to the commercial real estate cycle and allowing us to help drive furniture decisions earlier in the process.
For many of these years, our value-add solutions have been mostly aided by technology, but without being driven by technology. But the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has created new opportunities to deliver tens, if not hundreds, of test fits with metrics about adjacency, sunlight, and more, as well as budgetary numbers. And unlike in the past, when it could take weeks or more to run these test fits and do analyses, artificial intelligence has allowed us to take only hours or days to provide real estate professionals with the information that helps their clients make educated decisions about the space that will work best for their needs.
As a Certified MillerKnoll dealer, CFI Workspace has access to MillerKnoll's Atlas Digital Suite, a set of tools that uses the latest technology innovations to streamline the process from beginning to end. We believe that of special interest to the commercial real estate community is Compass, a system built on Autodesk's AI engine and MillerKnoll's decades of workplace research.
A Compass engagement with a broker, client, or designer begins with asking a series of basic questions to find out information like the number of people that need to be accounted for and how many of them are hybrid. We can get started on test fits from there, or we can input advanced requirements, like whether employees are directed or self-directed, independent or interdependent.
Next, we upload an empty floorplate and the system takes over, generating tens to hundreds of design options. First, it divides the floorplate into "neighborhoods" and then creates a block plan. Then, it overlays furniture options over top of each different block plan.
Each option is then evaluated on the strength of a variety of measures. Adjacency of departments and specific individuals is considered, as is the impact of "high-buzz" areas on the balance between worker focus and collaboration. The amount of natural light in the space and how it filters into each area can be shown, as can views to nature and the outdoors, both of which have been shown in research to improve productivity.
Once options are narrowed down, Compass can generate statistics based on a Conventional, Mixed, or Collaborative model. Clients can be shown how their choices affect the number of people in different workspace situations as well as how the introduction of non-traditional spaces like huddle rooms and work cafes influence the space allocation and budget. Further, the system can analyze, for these different models, the square footage needed per employee or workpoint, and how square footage (and dollars) can be saved by utilizing a different model.
While refining the program, our CFI Workspace account executives can input furniture suggestions and create a "good-better-best" budget for the CRE pros to share with their clients, including 3D concepts of workstations, private offices and other spaces. When the client has selected their scenario, Compass can generate files in AutoCAD, Revit, or CET to use as the basis to refine as we move into the extended design phase.
Since 1985, CFI Workspace has been aligning with commercial real estate professionals and design professionals to provide the best spaces for clients. Always a value-add partner, we're now looking to technology tools to create an even better experience for our partners and clients. Using the power of artificial intelligence, we are able to accelerate and streamline the process so that customers can get into their spaces more quickly and get down to business faster.