About 4Site

4SITE by CORT, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, provides you with actionable insights to make informed decisions about your workplace. In 2019, CORT expanded into sensor technology services for space utilization by acquiring 4SITE. This enables customers to make data-driven decisions about optimizing existing space and planning for future requirements. Powered by the Ibexlabs platform, 4SITE sensors capture and transmit motion data while protecting the privacy of the workforce by avoiding cameras or personal identification information. The motion data is processed using 4SITE algorithms and presented on a web-based dashboard. With two service levels to choose from, 4SITE and 4SITE PRO, you'll have all the data you need to make confident decisions about your workplace.

4SITE by CORT helps businesses understand their office space usage to make better real estate decisions, optimize costs and workspace usage, monitor worker proximity, and sanitize high-impact safety areas.

The Challenge

In the post-COVID-19 world, new variables such as hybrid and virtual working environments have been added to office operations. Businesses are required to offer virtual office options, enabling employees to work from home, while some offices follow a hybrid workplace approach, allowing employees to work from home or the office. However, determining how much workspace is required in such situations and reducing overhead costs can be challenging, as offices often do not operate at full capacity. There are questions that need answers, such as whether to renew or terminate the lease, whether additional space is needed, or if the current space is sufficient. With office spaces remaining empty, employers find themselves in a situation where they must decide whether to maintain their current workspace or downsize to avoid the over-cost of unused space. Additionally, employers must take care of employee productivity and safety.

The aim was to develop an on-demand SaaS-based architecture that could scale to the desired level, which would be accessible across multiple devices and provide real-time unified information instantly.

The Ibexlabs Solution

4SITE by CORT has partnered with Ibexlabs to achieve their goals by developing a new SaaS application. Ibexlabs provides ongoing development, UI/UX, platform operations, and maintenance across various AWS services, such as AWS IoT Core, Lambda, S3, etc

The solution was divided into multiple function-specific modules and developed using SaaS architecture, which facilitated quick development and integration. The entire solution was wrapped inside our proprietary SaaS framework. This custom, high-performing go-to-market SaaS framework provides out-of-the-box much-needed features in a SaaS application. These features include user and tenant management, authentication and authorization, subscription management, and integrated SaaS reporting and analytics.

The Ibexlabs team is handling the whole end-to-end development for 4SITE by CORT and leveraging the following parts:

• Creating and managing AWS infrastructure
• Maintaining security and upgrading software modules
• Conducting regular security checks of the servers
• Implementing alert mechanisms on various services
• Performing performance checks and monitoring
• Configuring and controlling the environment
• Deploying services using CI/CD tools
• Versioning source code
• Utilizing dynamic reporting tools and dashboards to capture real insights
• Using standard DevOps practices and tools to automate and reduce effort

AWS services that are we leveraged:

• AWS Lambda
• AWS S3
• AWS EC2
• Amazon RDS
• AWS Cloudwatch
• AWS IOT core
• AWS DynamoDB
• AWS Route53
• AWS Web Application Firewall

Results

The offices that partnered with 4SITE by CORT, powered by Ibexlabs, experienced significant workspace utilization, helping them maintain and anticipate their office spaces and reduce the budget. In less than five months, Ibexlabs helped 4SITE by CORT design and develop a robust SaaS application that helps businesses understand how their office space is being used, to make better real estate decisions, and optimize costs and workspace usage. The new service is built to scale with demand, allowing 4SITE by CORT to open up its revolutionary capabilities to a much larger base of customers.

4SITE by CORT was also able to create its new application at a much lower cost, as well as reduce future expenditures related to data storage, processing, and application development. In addition, there are other benefits, as follows:

• Improving workspace efficiency and utilization
• Creating an ideal work environment by determining the required number of meeting rooms, halls, and other office spaces
• Providing data analytics to help understand how much space is utilized
• Customizing the utilization report to fetch insights that give important data for making decisions on the workspace
• Improving safety and cleaning of the space: if the space is not currently utilized, a cleaning crew can be sent to help maintain cleaning standards
• Not bothering employees about their privacy, as the sensor captures objective data, not employee-specific information
• Automatically entering data, reducing the chances of human error when going with an observational, i.e., manual count

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The company continues to work with the Ibexlabs team, which is currently working on implementing a UX/UI design to prepare it for commercial deployment.