WHITE PAPER. Meetings are a necessary part of business, but what isn t necessary is the amount of time spent arranging them.

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1 WHITE PAPER How to improve your scheduling and meeting room booking processes with an integrated meeting room booking tool for your Outlook or Office 365 Calendar. Meetings are a necessary part of business, but what isn t necessary is the amount of time spent arranging them. Learn how an integrated booking tool can improve your time spent and keep you ahead when booking your meetings in Outlook.

2 11 IMPROVEMENTS An integrated meeting room booking extension to your Outlook Calendar can take away the hassle of meeting room booking and booking of associated services, improve your business meetings and enhance your workday productivity. Save hours on meeting room booking routines every week! Interested? Meeting scheduling is a routine activity in the workplace, yet it can be complicated and time-consuming if you don t have an efficient booking process and an integrated meeting room booking tool that takes away the hassle of finding available meeting rooms as well as order addtional and associated services. Meeting organizers are tasked with getting a group of busy people together at the same time and place. This may involve communicating back and forth with attendees via or phone. Once everyone agrees on a time to meet, meeting organizers have to find a meeting room that fits their needs as well as order audiovisual equipment, catering, and other additional services. Ever experinced that? All these time consuming and unsynchronized processes are costly and cumbersome for the service providers and service managers as well due to time spend on trying to be up-to-date or catering or other services being delivered at the wrong time or to the wrong meeting room. The challenges with an unsynchronized booking can be: Error-prone booking methods Wasted time and wasted resources Scheduling errors Damage to Client Perception and Company Image Inefficient use of Meeting Spaces Additional services being delivered at the wrong time or to the wrong meeting room However, it doesn t have to be this way. With an integrated meeting room booking tool for your Outlook calendar you can streamline meeting room booking processes and enhance productivity. Read on and learn about how you can improve your meeting room booking processes instantly with an integrated solution. When they re finished coordinating a meeting, meeting planners may find that they ve spent more time scheduling the meeting than they ll spend in the meeting itself.

3 Ditch 3rd party applications and Improve your meeting room booking processes with an integrated solution A growing number of companies are replacing manual, error-prone booking methods with meeting room booking software like Exchange and Outlook or Office 365. The built-in meeting scheduling software inside the Outlook Calendar streamlines the meeting room booking process and enables staff to complete meeting arrangements instantly. Users can search for available meeting rooms, book meetings and invite attendees with ease. All these features are standard features inside Outlook. Ditch 3rd party applications With an integrated meeting room booking extension integrated into the Outlook Calendar your staff members can even ditch 3rd party applications and order associated services inside Outlook in one streamlined process. Your employees then have a one-stop interface to control all bookings and all associated resources. This gives your staff better control of meeting planning and eliminates the need to use several different systems to schedule meetings or to use manual, unsyncronized systems, and optimize the time spent on booking and planning meetings. Flexibility is key in today s business environment. Your meeting room booking solution must support that. Using a centralized meeting booking system like Outlook that can be accessed from any location, over any connection, and on any device is critical as the workforce becomes more mobile. Staff members need to be able to book and reschedule meetings, even when they re away from the office. This maximizes productivity for the employee but it also creates a demand for an integrated meeting room booking extension into the Outlook Calendar your staff can reach when they are away of the office. To get the most out of your Outlook Calendar for meeting room booking the best solution is to use an integrated meeting room booking tool or meeting room bookin extension your employees can access inside Outlook across all devices. This gives the employee the freedom to book and reschedule meetings on the fly without having to worry about notifying service providers or that orders for associated services get lost. The value of an integrated, streamlined process Save time and plan with ease Handle all changes and cancellations automatically. Also for Vendor managers Prevent scheduling errors Easy user adoption - Staff members are already familiar with Outlook Book additional resources with ease - Even on the fly from any device Your organization as a whole stands to benefit from the implementation of an integrated meeting room booking extension software because meeting room management processes have a direct impact on your overall performance and financial standing. All meeting room users free up time to do what s important to your business instead of spending time on cumbersome, unsynchronized processes.

4 Let s look at the numbers! Meetings are a necessary part of business and we re in more meetings now than ever before. What isn t necessary is the amount of time spent arranging them. A study conducted by Atlassian suggests that 62 meetings attended monthly by most employees. This is supported by Ovum in collaboration with join.me by LogMeIn who report an average 17 meetings per week for Senior Executives. Ovum reports : Eight meetings per week, on average, across all employee types and company size 10 meetings per week for all employees above junior level 12 meetings per week for executive management and higher. 17 meetings per week for VP, director and c-level roles in highly collaborative industries such as financial services, technology, media and cpg According to a study conducted in September 2010, business professionals spend 4.75 hours of a typical workweek arranging meetings including ordering and booking additional resources for meeting as well as re-ordering and re-arranging associated bookings and services while meetings get rescheduled and relocated all the time hours per week equals a productivity loss of $237.5 at $50/hour or almost $1000/per employee/month. The opportunity cost is of course much higher. With the trend focusing on Activity Based Workspaces the need for flexible, bookable rooms get even more crucial and the numbers of meetings per week will definitely rise. Source: Meetings in America, A study of trends, costs, and attitudes toward business travel and teleconferencing, and their impact on productivity Eliminate the Chaos at Work: 25 Techniques to Increase Productivity Collaboration death of the web conference (as we know it)

5 11 improvements an integrated meeting room booking tool brings to your company Consolidate all activities related to planning and scheduling meetings Meeting room booking software replaces disparate systems with a single, easy-to-use solution that consolidates all activities related to planning and scheduling meetings. Staff members are able to order catering and other services without leaving Outlook. Ditch the manual processes No more paper-based booking methods, spreadsheets, and other outdated tools that add significantly to the workload of busy administrative staff. Ditch the manual processes for arranging meetings, such as phone calls, s, and post-it notes, leading to a lot of back and forth communication, Ditch 3rd party applications Book what you need inside Outlook, and catering or facilities management instantly knows exactly what, when, and where you need it. No need for any other application. Just use your Outlook Calendar. Your orders stay with the meeting Your orders stay with the meeting and instantly notify your vendors. No need to manually synchronize systems. Reschedule, relocate, or update without a worry. Tell at a glance what s needed Vendor managers can tell at a glance what's needed and how many people need service as well as the location of the service. Vendor managers have an instant one-stop interface with an updated overview in real time. Preventing scheduling errors All information about meeting rooms, schedules and additional resources reside in the same system, which is updated in real-time. Providing users with access to up-to-date meeting information in a centralized location prevents double bookings and other errors concerning addional resources. Information is is always accurate and you want have to worry about synchronization between disparate systems. No more catering being delivered at the wrong time or to the wrong meeting room No more meeting rooms being double booked, attendees showing up to cancelled meetings, or catering being delivered at the wrong time or to the wrong meeting room. With an integrated booking solution you can comunicate changes and cancellations immediately to meeting attendees and service providers. Handle all changes and cancellations automatically If a meeting is changed or cancelled, the system is updated automatically. This means that attendees and service providers are notified immediately and have time to adjust their schedules. Ditch mistakes, uncertainty and frustration You can ditch mistakes, uncertainty and frustration among staff and visitors will get a strong first improssion of your company due to well organized meetings. This also gives you the ability to keep important projects on track. Save time for all meeting room users. Enhance productivity. Be efficient. Save time. Plan more effectively. No more back and forth communication jumping in and out of disparate systems. Meeting room scheduling software saves meeting room users, facility managers, receptionists, and other staff members time. It enhances your staff s productivity and frees up time to focus on whats important to your business. Easy user adoption Your staff members are already familiar with Outlook and it s interface. An integrated booking tool that s built on top of that and simplifies the process of booking rooms and resources inside Outlook encourage user adoption and will gain favor with users.

6 Want to learn more? We cannot help you improve the output of the meeting, but we can make it easier for you to organize it. At AskCody we help people and their organizations improve both productivity and happiness by truly Connecting People with Places and Events - Dynamically. Give us a call or send us a note to learn more. info@askcody.com Copyright 2014 AskCody