Configure Workplace entity and entity types

Release version: Zurich

Updated July 31, 2025

2 minutes to read

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Summary of Configure Workplace entity and entity types

This feature enables ServiceNow customers to create a business hierarchy that mirrors their organizational structure by configuring workplace entity types and workplace entities. This hierarchy facilitates the association of workplace locations with specific business units, departments, or cost centers, allowing for efficient space allocation and management aligned with the organization's business model.

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Key Features

Workplace Entity Types and Entities: Define various entity types such as Business Units or Marketing Units and associate workplace entities like ITSM or Facilities under these types to build a parent-child hierarchical structure.
Hierarchy Configuration: Set the order of entity types to establish hierarchy levels, where lower order numbers represent higher hierarchy levels, enabling clear organizational mapping.
Space Allocation and Visualization: Manage and allocate workplace spaces based on entity levels. Visualize space utilization and allocations via stack plans and floor maps filtered by workplace entities.
Push Down and Activation Controls: Use the "Push down" feature to apply changes from parent workplace entities to child entities. Activate or deactivate entities, noting that deactivating a parent affects all child entities.
Direct Entity Actions: Perform operations on parent entities that cascade to child entities, simplifying management across the hierarchy.
Filtering and Management: Easily filter workplace locations by entity types for streamlined administration and reporting.

Key Outcomes

Establish a structured business hierarchy for workplace management that reflects your organization's real-world business units and departments.
Optimize space usage and allocation with clear visibility into how workplace locations are associated with specific business entities.
Improve control over space consumption by business units, enabling better resource planning and utilization tracking.
Leverage hierarchical actions to efficiently manage workplace entities and ensure consistent application of policies across related entities.

Additional Notes

While workplace entities enable detailed space administration and visualization, they do not support scenario creation. The configuration supports integration with other workplace management capabilities such as shift management, reservations, and QR code management, enhancing overall workplace operational efficiency.

Create a business hierarchy based on your organization's businesses. Allocate workplace locations based on the business to which they’re associated with. Configure workplace entity types and workplace entities to create the structure. For example, add entity types such as Business Units, Marketing Units, and associate workplace entities such as ITSM, Facilities, and more under them.

The Workplace Core applications enable you to classify your workplace locations based on their cost center, department, and workplace entity. The workplace entity-based allocation helps you in create an organized business structure where you can configure parent-child-based hierarchies and manage various workplace-related activities. You can create a structure exactly as your organization's business by configuring workplace entity types and workplace entities. You can associate locations based on the business to which they’re associated with.

As a workplace manager, you can manage space allocations based on their entity levels that are set and verify proper space utilization according to business. You can visualize data on the stack plan and floor map based on the workplace entities that you’ve configured. You can view the space allocations of a building based on workplace entities. At any time, you can select a space and know its hierarchy level, that is, the details of its parent and child if present. This business-based hierarchy model, that is, workplace entity-based allocation, enables you to control the space consumption of each business in your organization. The Space Optimization dashboard also enables you to visualize data based on the different workplace entities configured. For more information about how workplace entities and other allocations work, refer to Allocation - types, setting, and impact.

Important:

You can’t create a scenario based on workplace entities. You can only view and make map based space administration for workplace entities.

At any time, you can filter your workplace locations and perform various actions easily on these entities directly. The application enables you to specify an order to each entity type based on which a hierarchy is set. For a parent-child hierarchy, you can also perform direct actions on a parent if you want to implement the same throughout its child entities.

With the hierarchy-based configuration, you can perform the following actions:

You can create various entity types and set their level using the entity-mapping options. When you create workplace entities, you can assign them to these entity types.
You can set the order of an entity type based on its level in the hierarchy. The lower the order, the higher the entity type is set in the hierarchical structure. The lowest ordered entity type is set in the highest level in the hierarchy. For example, if you set ABC with order 1000 and XYZ with order 600 then XYZ is placed on top in the hierarchy level and ABC is set to lowest.
You can use the Push down option if you want to push down the workplace entity to child locations at any time. For more information about how an allocation works, refer to Allocation - types, setting, and impact.
You can activate or deactivate a workplace entity. Deactivating a workplace entity also deactivates the child workplace entity.
Important:
If the parent is inactive, you can’t activate a workplace entity.