This blog is a deep dive into the new features for the May 4, 2023 release of the Workplace Service Delivery (WSD) Store Apps.
Please note that this is a summary of most notable items, not an exhaustive list. For full details, refer to the Product documentation and release notes on the ServiceNow Store.
New features:
- Workplace Analytics Dashboards
- Space Optimization
- Lease Administration
- Maintenance Management
Enhancements:
- Health and Safety Incident Management
- Adding visitors to incidents and investigations
- Updates on navigation and ease of use for employees
- Workspace enhancements: drillable dashboards and ability to create incidents and observations from the workspace view
- My Requests on the Employee Center to include Health and Safety Incident tracking and notifications
- Reservation Management
- Adding a message to a reservation that can be shared with attendees
- Retain services when updating a reservation
- Limit how far in the future reservations can be made
- Notify employees of pre-existing reservations
- Sort building, floor, area and neighborhood selectors
- Multi-building reservations using neighborhoods
- Neighborhoods
- Show all spaces belonging to a neighborhood while making a reservation
- Indoor mapping
- Ability to ingest larger AutoCAD files
- Auto compute Building boundary
- Indoor Mapping / WSD data sync enhancements
- Indoor Mapping / WSD data sync notifications
- Space Recommender
- Enhanced space options for visualization and selection
- Manage approvals for space requests
- Auto-deployment and allocation tracking
- Mobile
- Warning of existing meetings
- Limit how far in the future reservations can be made
- Neighborhood reservations
Workplace Analytics Dashboards
Three new Workplace Analytics dashboards provide data insights, trends and key performance indicators that help organizations make informed decisions based on data from the following applications:
- Space Optimization
- Lease Administration
- Maintenance Management
Space Optimization Dashboard
Personas: Space Planner / Facility Manager
Roles: sn_wsd_spcmgmt.space_planner, sn_wsd_spcmgmt.manager, sn_wsd_rsv.manager, or sn_wsd_core.workplace_manager
Plugins: Workplace Safety Management, Workplace Central, Workplace Space Management, Workplace Stack plan, Workplace Indoor Mapping
The Space Optimization dashboard from the Workplace Analytics page located in Workplace Central gives data driven insights to Facility Managers and Space Planners based on the following metrics and filters:
- Location capacity vs. utilization
- Peak utilization days
- Space utilization by department
- Space utilization by space type
The utilization data for these metrics and calculated from the reservation data. The Space Planner can view trends across the entire organization or use the location filters to dig deeper into each region, cost center, department over a specific period.
Lease Administration Dashboard
Persona: Lease Manager
Roles: sn_wsd_la.manager, sn_wsd_la.admin
Plugins: Workplace Central, Workplace Lease Administration
Lease Administration metrics provide Lease Managers an overview of all their contract statuses on a global level, and can also be broken down by site, region, campus, building and floor levels which enables them to keep track of all expiring and near expiring lease contracts.
Maintenance Management
Persona: Facility Manager
Roles: sn_wsd_maintenance.manager / sn_wsd_maint.admin
Plugins: Workplace Central, Workplace Maintenance Management
The Maintenance Management dashboard provides insights into the following metrics, including:
- PMP (Planned Maintenance Percentage)
- PMC (Planned Maintenance Compliance)
- MTTR (Mean Time To Repair)
- Number of open cases
The dashboard also provides reports on trends over time, enabling Facility Managers to have an overview of the following:
- Corrective vs preventative cases
- Average time of maintenance cases
- Planned maintenance percentage
- Planned maintenance compliance trend
Health and Safety Incident Management
Personas: Health and Safety Agents
Plugin: Upgrade Health and Safety Incident Management to Utah
Adding visitors to incidents and investigations
Health and Safety teams can now track both employees and visitors in Health and Safety Incident Management. When creating an injury and illness report, Health and Safety teams now have the option to select the person type as employee or visitor to collect the injury and illness report for visitors. Health and Safety teams can also add visitors to people involved during the investigation process.
In the Employee Center, employees can report if a visitor was involved in an incident or observation using the visitor field.
Note: The visitors will first need to have been registered for them to appear in the Visitor field selection.
How can visitors be registered?
This depends on how the customer is licensed:
- Health and Safety SKU: Use the “Set Up a Visit” record producer in the Employee Center which will populate the sn_im_core_visitor table.
- WSD Professional or Enterprise SKU: Use the “Register a Guest” record producer in the Employee Center which will populate the sn_wsd_visitor_registration table.
Health and Safety agents also will be able to add registered visitors to incidents, observations, injuries/illness, and investigations within the Workspace. Once the visitor has been registered, agents will also be able to select them from the drop down to add them to the record.
Updates on navigation and ease of use in the Health and Safety Workspace:
Workspace enhancements:
- Health and Safety teams will now be able to create incidents and observations directly in the Health and Safety workspace from the “new incident” or “new observation” button to reduce the number of clicks for users to create these records.
- In the Health and Safety incident view, detail fields have been rearranged to move related fields closer together.
- To assist with navigation, a link with a parent record is now available at the top of the child record to reduce clicks.
- To assist with visibility for the agent, descriptive information will appear if they hover their mouse over a child case tab.
- Drillable dashboards and reports: Users now will be able to click into the Performance Analytics data cards to see their information at the record level.
Updated Employee Center My Requests to include Health and Safety Incident tracking
Employees are now able to track their Health and Safety related requests within the Employee Center. They will be able to see the status of their requests and communicate back to the Health and Safety teams assigned to them.
If there is any update or change, email notifications and notifications in the Employee Center will be sent to the employee to notify them.
Reservation Management
Personas: System Administrator and employees
Plugin: Workplace Reservation Management
Adding a message to a reservation that can be shared with attendees
Employees creating a reservation will now be able to include a message (e.g. Agenda) to attendees when reserving a space.
To activate this feature, the Workplace Admin will need to enable the ‘Allow reservation message’ for each reservable module in which this is necessary.
When reserving a space, the employee will be able to select a specific space and will then be prompted on the following page to add a reservation title, add attendees, and add a message, notes or an agenda that will be sent out to all once the reservation is confirmed.
The user will also be able to edit the notes when editing the reservation. If the space is synchronized with a calendar provider, the message will also be added.
Additionally, when an employee updates the body in their calendar this update is not synchronized to WSD. However, when updating the reservation in WSD (edits to the time/ date) the body is also updated and will overwrite the changes made by the employee in their own calendar.
Retain services when updating a reservation
Previously, when editing reservations where services were requested (e.g. Catering or equipment needed), the added services were discarded. With this new release, services are retained automatically when the employee only changes the date or time of their reservation, or they will be prompted to either retain or discard additional services when making edits to the time, day, and location of an existing reservation.
Special notes when retaining services:
- When retaining the services, the quantity is reset to “1”.
- One-time services like space layouts or support will not be retained.
- When the employee adds another space to a multi-location reservation, services are not prompted to add additional services to the newly added locations.
- If the employee changes one or more spaces in a multi-location reservation, the employee will be prompted to either retain or discard additional services to the newly added spaces.
Employees will also be notified by the warning message ‘Not available at this location’ if the extra services previously requested are no longer available in the newly selected locations.
Limit how far in the future reservations can be made
Workplace admins can define how many days in the future reservations can be made. To do so the ‘Max day in the future’ is defined at the reservable module level.
When creating a reservation, employees will not be able to select a date beyond the max value set by the Workplace admin, all days passed the max date in the future can not be selected. Dates entered manually are reset to the current date.
Notify user of pre-existing reservations
Workplace admins can now enable the ‘warn employee for duplicate reservations’ field on the Reservable Module for a warning to be shown when an employee is trying to make a similar (same space type) reservation for the same date and time of any existing reservation.
Sort building, floor, area and neighborhood selectors
Workplace admins can now configure the sorting orders in which the location hierarchy (floors, buildings, campus, sites, regions, and neighborhoods) will be shown when an employee is searching for a specific location using the filter menu, by setting the “Order” field in these tables. If no order is defined, the sorting will be done alphabetically.
Multi-building reservations using neighborhoods
Neighborhoods were introduced in our February 2023 release. When making a multi-location reservation, employees can now browse by neighborhood to search for available spaces. If the neighborhoods are restricted, only those specified users will be able to view them and reserve spaces within them.
Note: The ability to create a multi-building reservation using neighborhoods is not available on Mobile. These reservations will need to be made via the Employee Center Portal.
Show all spaces belonging to a neighborhood while making a reservation
When reserving a space in a neighborhood, employees will now see all spaces that belong to the selected neighborhood. Earlier, only available spaces in that neighborhood were indicated.
Pre-fill neighborhood details
The building and floor will be pre-filled after selecting a neighborhood while making a reservation. The building and floor values are based on the values in the workplace profile after assigning the employee to the neighborhood.
Reservation path while editing a reservation
Enable employees to select the context (path) while editing a reservation. You can enable per reservable module if the paths are visible, and which path to default to when editing the reservation.
Indoor mapping
Ability to ingest larger AutoCAD files
Workplace admins can now upload CAD files up to 200MB in size. Previously, the maximum file size was 100MB. However, keep in mind that the larger the file is, the more impact it could have on the map performance.
Note: CAD files will still need to adhere to our guidelines in order for them to be ingested and properly rendered in the Indoor Mapping Studio.
Auto compute Building boundaries
Previously, an auto compute feature was available for Campuses. This is now available for Buildings to avoid problems that appear when Places or Directions are not within the selected Building’s boundary. To do so, it is necessary to check the “Auto-compute boundary” checkbox. The building boundary is then automatically re-computed based on its floors, places and directions.
Indoor Mapping / WSD data sync enhancements
Workplace Admins now have additional capabilities available to them when deleting places and synchronizing new Place types:
- When the Sync tool detects a deleted place in the Indoor Map, it will propose the new Retire operation. Retire is the default operation and can be changed to unlink. Retire means the space will be deactivated in the space table. Unlink means all the links with IM are deleted but the space remains active in the WSD space table.
- When the Sync tool detects a new Place Type, it will automatically assign it to the Miscellaneous WSD Space Type if not mapped to any existing Space type.
Indoor Mapping / WSD data sync notifications
When changes are done in the Map Studio, synchronization is required to reflect these changes in the WSD table. A notification will be sent once a day to inform users in the “Managed by” fields when unsynchronized data are detected.
To enable this, Workplace Admins can check the “Send Sync Script Notification” checkbox in the Workplace Indoor Mapping View of the WSD Campus Table, and fill the Managed by fields.
Space Recommender
Personas: Space Planner, System Administrator and employees
Plugins: Workplace Safety Management, Workplace Space Management, Workplace Case Management, Workplace Central, Workplace Indoor Mapping
The Space Recommender capability was released in February 2023 and has been enhanced during this May release. Space Recommender now allows space requesters to submit a ‘Space assist request’ on Employee Center to get recommendations for space allocation plans based on input parameters, including space quantity, department, cost center, locations, space types move-in/move-out dates, and will also take into consideration the workplace polices set by the organization through the recommendation rules.
Improve option visualization
Following the submission of a Space Assist Request, the employee will be prompted with 3 recommendations which will be listed based on the percentage of similarity to the request. Before selecting one of these options, the end user has the possibility to view the options in more detail by viewing the map layout.
Approvals for Space requests
Once the user has submitted the space request and has chosen the option that best suits their requirements, the request will be sent for approval. The requester’s manager can approve or reject and add additional comments before final validation and deployment.
Auto-deployments & Allocation tracking
Once the Space Planner deploys the request to the production data, the edits to the relative spaces will be effective. All space requests will be visible to the Space Planner through the dashboard present in Workplace Central, where he will be able to monitor each request’s status.
Mobile
Warning of existing meeting
Employees will receive a similar notification that is shown on the portal when they are trying to create a reservation for a similar time as one they already created. The message is visible after the reservation gets created.
Limit how far in the future reservations can be made
If a Workplace admin has limited how far a reservation can be made in the future at the Reservable module level, this will be enforced in the mobile app as well. Therefore, the employee can view for each reservable module how far in the future a reservation can be made.
Neighborhood reservations
Employees can now make reservations using Neighborhoods on the Mobile app.
To explore further and access detailed technical documentation, we recommend using https://docs.servicenow.com/ .
