SmartHotDesk

API-led Architecture

Inspiration

During the pandemic employees adapted very well to working from home and this type of working has proven itself as beneficial for both employers and employees.

Now that we slowly move back to the office we see that the new norm is here to stay as an ever increasing number of companies choose to keep this flexible type of working and allow their employees to manage on their own when they want to work from the office.

Employees going to the office from 1 to 3 days per week is quite common and this in turn has pushed SMEs to move to smaller offices, cutting the high cost of unused office space.

This transition has also changed the way desks are allocated to employees, with hotdesking replacing the old model of individual owned desks.

Idea

In this newly formed landscape, we wanted to build an quick and effective hotdesk booking system which will allow employees to book a hotdesk with minimal effort and an intelligent algorithm that will allocate desks to them in such a way that everyone will sit next to his team members.

This will cut the hassle of finding and booking a desk while at the same time the smart allocation could increase productivity, as teams working on the same project will sit and work together.

Solution using MuleSoft

We've used MuleSoft API-led connectivity to build a business flow that captures the intention of the employee to book a desk and an intelligent algorithm which runs once per day and allocates desks to employees based on the team they belong to.

The intentions are captured with the help of Alexa and processed by MuleSoft, enriched with additional info pulled from other backend systems. After the algorithm allocates the desks, the employees are notified via an email.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges was to convert the office blueprint in a format that would be usable by MuleSoft.

We've chosen to model the office in a NoSQL database (MongoDB) mainly because we consider the static nature of the office entity not ideal for a classic entity-relationship database.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Within just one month from the inception of the idea, we were able to deliver an MVP of our application with 5 main features:

Get, via a voice command, the members of one's team that have booked a desk for a particular day. Book, via a voice command, a desk for a particular day Check, via a voice command, the status of the booking and the allocated desk number if the algorithm has run for that day Cancel the booking, via a voice command Allocation Algorithm, assigning desk to employees next to their team members and notifying them via email Delivering the MVP so quickly was possible by leveraging MuleSoft API-led Connectivity and reusable Assets and APIs.

What's next for SmartHotDesk

Our intention is to apply this solution to our own company and manage the hotdesking process through it.

A few additions will be required to make it even more smart and easy to use:

Web Portal channel for employees who don't own an Alexa device. Promote the Alexa Skill to Production and link it our organization's AD. Supplementary features like "Book me a desk near a printer", "Book me a meeting room with a projector" etc SMS notifications