Tag Archives: Workspace Solutions

Ideas Flock together with new Flock line from Hon and Workspace Solutions

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The current trend in office design encourages people to get up from their desks occasionally, to spend some time together collaborating and creating new concepts.  To make this work w need inviting spaces that welcome employees to work together away from their desks or workstations.  This fall, Hon Office Furniture and Workspace Solutions, your Hon dealer for Fort Wayne, and northern Indiana introduce Flock.  Flock supports collaboration and creates an environment of how people want to work and where they want to work.   Instead of making team members “make do” for group activities, Flock lets you dedicate zones where teamwork comes naturally.  As with all office furniture at Workspace Solutions, Flock from Hon is made for work.  It’s tough, hardworking, yet great loopking office furniture designed to last a long time and get the job done.    Flock by Hon becomes available this fall at Workspace Solutions in Fort Wayne, IN.

Google’s new London Office Offers us a Sneak Peak at the Future

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Google has been  a trend setter in style and management over the past several years. So, when Google builds a new office (this time in London), the rest of us check it out to see if there’s any great new ideas we need to borrow, or at least to see what our office might look like in another ten years or so.  If Google’s London office is any clue, we’ll be seeing more padding on the walls, and a continuation of the trend to encourage employees to collaborate and work from many different parts of the office, technology freeing us from being tethered to our desks.

For fun, anyway, take a look at Google’s new London office in this web article by the website, digital trends.  Click here

What Google ideas would you like to see in your office?

 

National goes Green

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It’s not enough today to simply buy office furniture that looks great, works hard, and comes in at a good price point.  Businesses today are also concerned about their carbon footprint, making sure they’re running green facilities as well as purchasing products that are gentle on the environment.

 

Workspace Solutions is proud to work with many suppliers who are leaders in green technology.  Their latest is an Indiana Company, National Office Furniture, a brand unit of Kimball International, Inc.  Their caseboods and tables manufacturing facility in Santa Claus, IN has just been awarded the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Silver) for Exisiting Buildings by the US Green Building Council (USGBC).  This makes National’s Santa Clause facility the first LEED-certified office furniture manufacturing facility in Inaiana, and only the 11th location in the state to earn a LEED certification in the industrial manufacturing category.  What all this means is that whenever National builds a piece of office furniture here in Indiana, it has used less energy, and recycled more leftover material than it used to before the LEED certification.

For you, it means that when you buy National Office furniture from Workspace Solution,you’ve minimized the environmental impact of that purchase, and that’s good for our planet.

“National Office Furniture has proved their leadership in the manufacturing sector through their LEED Silver certification,” said Rick Fedrizzi, President, CEO & Founding Chair, U.S. Green Building Council. “By targeting sustainability, National has raised the bar for manufacturing facilities everywhere. We commend them on this great achievement.”

“At National, we are never satisfied when it comes to safety, quality and sustainability. Our Santa Claus facility earned previous sustainable accolades, but we knew we could improve, and we did in achieving LEED Silver. We’re very proud to be a good corporate neighbor and operate a high-caliber, green certified facility in the community,” said Mendy Claridge, Director of Sustainability, LEED AP ID+C, National Office Furniture.

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Thousands of people in the office furniture business are in Chicago today at the final day of the 44th annual NeoCon — the National Exposition of Contract Furnishings show at the Merchandise Mart.

This is where we find all of the new innovations in office furniture and design that we will be including in our office plans for the coming year. In the weeks ahead, we’ll be sharing some of the new products introduced at the show that we will be carrying very soon.

In general, what’s happening this year? Well, Byron S. Morton, vice president of leasing for Merchandise Mart Properties, described the changes in the market as a move toward the collaboration of “live and work.” One of this year’s office trends is making the office feel more like home.
“What does the iPad generation need — or not need? They need connectivity and don’t need big bulky furniture,” Morton said.
We’ve seen a huge interest in hospital and medical furniture over the past years, and expect new things in this area as well. Re-visit our site in a couple of weeks, and we’ll show you what new things are heading to our showroom.

Is there such a thing as a “too quiet” office?

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Hon Open Office furniture from Workspace Solutions

Sometimes, less is more.  It seems to be that way in today’s modern offices.  With ultra quiet heating and cooling system, no more clunking of electric typewriters, and emails replacing rining phones, the modern office is quieter than ever, and that seems to be the problem.  It is now easier than ever to be distracted by a conversation, evenone fifty or sixty feet away from your work station or desk. Being able to hear office conversations more easily has also had a chilling effect on having office conversations.  People know that everyone will hear every word.

Still, the advantages of an open office are many, with an increase in collaboration and idea sharing on the top of the list.

When Autodesk, a software company, moved into a an open-plan building in Massachusetts, three years ago, it installed what is known as a pink-noise system: a soft whooshing emitted over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices.

Autodesk ran the system for three months without telling the employees — and then, to gauge its impact, turned it off one day.

“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”

Others, like Anne-Laure Fayard  a professor of management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University are studying the issue. According to Fayard, “Everyone is still experimenting with ways to balance the need for collaboration and the need for privacy.”

Sound proofing materials, and designing for privacy are a considerations taken into account by the office planners at Workspace Solutions.  Having a wide variety of office furniture options from the nations’ top providers, as Workspace does, helps as well.   Meantime, it’s nice to know that research continues into the creation of the perfect office.

How Cloud Computing will affect Office Furniture Design

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The cloud is simply a digital file storage system you access through the internet rather than through your network.  Your documents and spread sheets are stored in buildings thousands of miles away from the office and are accessible to you, and other employees, no matter where you are.  So, if you don’t need company servers anymore, maybe it’s time to think about converting the server room to another conference room.  With wireless cloud technology, you can plop down on any computer anywhere in the office, or on the road for that matter, so why do you need your own cubicle?  Work more comfortabley from a large work table, or sit and collaborate with fellow employees and still easily work on or share documents from your laptop to theirs through the cloud.  You don’t need as many non-assigned desks as you do private workstations.  Half you staff may be on the road at any given time anyway, especially your sales staff.  This means using limited space in a more efficient manner, even reducing square footage and high rents with come with that.  This cloud may not bring rain, but it does bring new ways to designe and utilize work space, and Workspace Solutions designers all over it.

If you’re still a bit cloudy on what cloud computing is, here’s a video that can shed some light on the subject.

RFIDs help hosptals find equipment, files, and improve health care for patients

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During the summer of 2007, Capital Health System, an acute-care and teaching hospital located inTrenton,New Jersey, began tracking every medical file using RFID technology.  What is RFID?  It stands for Radio Frequency Identification.  Every file has a small RFID circuit chip attached to it.  This chip broadcasts an ID signal that can be picked up by special RFID receiving devices.  In other words, if someone take a patient file, and leaves it in another part of the hospital, the RFID receiver can locate it quickly.

 

Capital Health System manages 5,000 patient files. Each file is tagged with an RFID tag allowing it to be tracked from the moment it is created for a new patient all the way until the file is retained in storage.  The RFID readers can be positioned at various locations around the hospital to report in real time the locations for every file. Effieicieny improves, and liability is reduced.

 

Hopsitlas are also using RFID technology to:

  • Continuously track each patient’s location
  • Track the location of doctors and nurses in the hospital
  • Track the location of expensive and critical instruments and equipment
  • Restrict access to drugs, pediatrics, and other high-threat areas to authorized staff
  • Monitor and track unauthorized persons who are loitering around high-threat areas
  • Facilitate triage processes by restricting access to authorized staff and “approved” patients during medical emergencies, epidemics, terrorist threats, and other times when demands could threaten the hospital’s ability to effectively deliver services
  • Use the patient’s RFID tag to access patient information for review and update through a hand-held computer

 

 

The problem at Christiana Hospital in Newark,Del., where the emergency department has 76 treatment rooms that handle more than 100,000 patients yearly, was that triage nurses were losing track of where patients were in the treatment process as they were moved among diagnostic and treatment facilities. The result: The overall length of a patient’s stay was spiking above normal levels, and about 4% to 5% were leaving without any treatment at all.  An RFID system combined with computer software that associates patients with equipment and treatments solved this problem.

 

Recent surveys show RFID based solutions are really starting to take off in hospitals around the country.  Many hospitals see RFID solutions as part of taking the step into digital record keeping.

 

Workspace Solutions is teaming with Spacefile, a storage solution company that offers both RFID technology, and innovative physical storage solutions that allow you to store more in less space.

Extreme Offices

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The Bill and Melinda Gatets Foundation built a half billion dollar office facility in Seattle where they hope to solve some of the world’s toughest problems.  The first problem they tackled was how to better utilize office space to use less of it per employee, while increasing collaboration.  The way they accomplished this is strongly influencing new furniture design and office layouts.

 

To read the whole story, click here

Technology and GenY are Driving Changes in Office Design

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We’ve commented here on our blog about some of the exciting new design ideas we’re seeing and using in office design today. Here’s a great article that talks about what’s driving some of the radical changes in office design. Read it here.

 

 

Do You Want to Make More Money?

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Remember the old TV commercial where actress Sally Struthers asked us if we wanted to make more money? And the answer was, “Sure, we all do.” Here are a few ways for you to make more money, without a whole lot of effort (Thanks to ABCO, one of our fine office furniture suppliers)
Buy Fluorescent Light Bulbs
Fluorescent bulbs use less energy, emit less heat and last longer than those incandescent bulbs.

Weather Strip Doors and Windows
You may even be eligible for a tax deduction.

Recycle Paper
There are two sides to every piece of paper. Just avoid re-using paper with confidential info on it. Shred that.

Turn Your Equipment Off
At one time, the computer people told us to leave our computers on. Now, it is perfectly OK to turn them off or put them into sleep mode when not in use.

Replace Your Inkjet with a Laser
Laser printers aren’t expensive to buy, and they cost a whole lot less to use than ink jets.

Use a Programmable Thermostat
Set it once and forget it. Why heat the office or showroom if no one’s there?

Another way to save money is with used office furniture, the good kind that we carry here at Workspace Solutions. Check out our used page here.