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Viithiisys
Workplace Operations

The same process, running differently at every site you have.

Visitors, contractors, access, desks and incidents. Head office writes one process, the site with a gate runs another, and the difference sits in a book at reception.

Talk to a senior engineerNeed a workflow assessment?
One site, one morningWhere it is recorded

The record for this morning is in two places, and one of them is a book.

Shape of an early shift, illustrative. No time, count or claim on this page is read off this drawing.

Four ways it breaks

What breaks once there is more than one site.

None of these is a fault in a product. Each is a place where one written process met a building it was not written for, and somebody sensible worked around it.

  1. The process assumes somebody is at the desk

    Reception opens at half past eight and the first contractor arrives before six. Everything that happens in between is recorded by whoever is there, in whatever they have to hand, or not at all.

  2. One estate, several ways of opening a door

    Sites acquired or fitted out at different times carry different panels and different cards, and nothing joins them. There is no single place to ask who can open a particular door, so the answer is assembled by asking people.

  3. Whether a contractor is cleared to work lives with whoever cleared them

    The induction happened. The record of it is a signature in a folder at one site, so the same person arriving at a second site is inducted again, or waved through because somebody vouches for them.

  4. Every site means something different by an incident

    So the estate-wide incident count is not a count of anything. The site reporting the most is usually the site reporting best, and the quiet site is the one nobody has looked at.

What we take on

What we take on, and in what order.

Not a product and not a rip-out. This is the work of making one record hold what several sites do differently, and of leaving alone the parts that differ for a reason.

  1. One arrival record, whatever the door

    The same fields for a visitor at reception, a contractor at a gate at six in the morning and a delivery at a goods door. Different routes in, one record out, because the record is the thing anyone will ever be asked to produce.

  2. The systems that already hold half of it

    Access panels, the HR system, the building landlord, the contractor management your insurer asked for. Read access first, so what can and cannot be joined is established before anything is designed.

  3. Contractor competence and induction, as a register

    Who is cleared, for what, at which site, until when. Held once for the estate rather than once per folder, so a second site does not have to take the first site on trust.

  4. Access answered per person, not per panel

    What this person can open, across every site, in one answer. It is the question an auditor asks and the question a leaver makes urgent, and today it is usually four questions to four people.

  5. Desks, rooms and the bookings worth keeping

    Where a floor is genuinely contended, booking is worth the friction. Where it is not, we will say so rather than install it. The interesting output is usually what the bookings reveal, not the bookings.

  6. A roll call that works on the day it is needed

    Who is on this site right now, produced in the two minutes anyone will give you, including the people the desk never handled. That last clause is the entire reason the paper book exists.

We do not sell or install access-control panels, turnstiles, badge printers or cameras. Where the constraint is hardware at one door, we will say so.

The same process, three times

One process. Three sites. Three different processes.

Every row runs the same five stages in the same columns. What changes is which stages happen, in what order, and what happens where one does not.

One processA contractor arrives to do planned work.

As writtenDifferent hereDoes not happen

  1. Head office

    Staffed reception. Where the process was written.

    1. NotifiedThe host raises it in the visitor system a few days ahead.
    2. IdentityPhoto ID at the desk, checked against the booking.
    3. InductionTaken on a tablet in the lobby before the host is called.
    4. AccessA day badge issued at the desk, escorted past the barrier.
    5. Sign-outBadge returned, record closed, host notified.

  2. The site with a gate

    Two shifts, one entrance, a guard from six in the morning.

    1. NotifiedPhoned through to the gatehouse the evening before, because the visitor system does not reach it.
    2. IdentityChecked by the guard, who writes the name in the book because that is what is on the desk.
    3. InductionRuns 4thGiven on the floor by the supervisor, after the contractor is already inside.
    4. AccessRuns 3rdA spare fob from a drawer, on the older of the two panels.
    5. Sign-outNothing closes it. The fob comes back when it comes back, and sometimes it does not.

    Permit to workIssued at the gate for anything hot, and kept in a folder there. It is the strictest control on the estate and head office has never seen one.

  3. The leased floor

    Somebody else's lobby, somebody else's guard, your obligations.

    1. NotifiedRaised in the visitor system exactly as written.
    2. IdentityChecked downstairs by the building, into the building's own system, which you cannot read.
    3. InductionNot done. The building inducts people for the building; nobody inducts them for your floor.
    4. AccessTwo credentials: the turnstile pass downstairs and your own door upstairs.
    5. Sign-outThe building closes its record at the turnstile. Yours stays open until somebody notices.

Has to be identical at every site

  • Who the person is, and that it is the same person another site met last month.
  • Who authorised them to be there, by name.
  • Which site, which day, what time in and what time out.
  • Whether the induction they need is current, wherever it happened to be taken.

Has to be local to the site

  • Which door they come through, and who is standing at it.
  • When the site is staffed, and what is supposed to happen in the hours it is not.
  • What the induction covers, and whether the person is escorted, because both follow from the hazards the site actually has.
  • Who is allowed to say yes, which on a leased floor may not be anyone who works for you.

Three composites rather than three clients. The design rule is in the panels above: the record is uniform, the route into it is not.

Where we say no

What we will not build, and when the answer is nothing yet.

Two of these four are a smaller piece of work than you came for, and one of them is no project at all. All four are a better outcome for you than the version that gets abandoned in a quarter.

  1. One process imposed on every site

    It is the version bought most often and abandoned first. The site that cannot follow it goes back to the book, and now the estate has two records and trusts neither.

  2. Desk booking on a floor nobody is fighting over

    Booking makes a contention problem visible; it does not create one. On an uncontended floor it mostly produces bookings nobody honours and a utilisation number nobody believes.

  3. A rollout to the whole estate at once

    One site taken through a full cycle, including one bad morning, tells you more than a pilot at every site that all ran on a quiet Tuesday.

  4. A replacement for the part that is working

    If head office is fine and the problem is the other five sites, the work is at the other five sites. That is a smaller engagement and we would rather scope it than sell around it.

There is also an answer that is nothing yet. If nobody at the gate may change what happens there, settle who decides before anyone writes a proposal.

Start with a workflow assessment instead
How the work runs

How the work runs, step by step.

The first two steps are measurement rather than build, and they are where this turns out to be smaller than the brief more often than it turns out to be larger.

  1. Start at the site least like head office

    Not the flagship. The one with the early shift, the gate or the shared lobby, because that is where the written process already fails and where the workaround already exists to be read.

  2. Read the workaround before reading the system

    The book at the gate, the group chat, the drawer of spare fobs, the folder of permits. Those are the requirements, already written, by the people who had to keep working anyway.

  3. Settle the record before settling the routes into it

    Decide what every site must hold identically, then decide separately how each site puts it there. Doing this the other way round is exactly how one process ends up imposed on six buildings.

  4. Prove it on a bad morning

    An arrival before the desk opens, a contractor whose induction has lapsed, a visitor whose host has forgotten them. A system that only handles the ordinary morning is the paper book with extra steps.

  5. Hand each site its own settings

    Hours, doors, who authorises and what the induction covers, changed by the site without a ticket to us. The alternative is that the site changes them on paper, which is where this started.

One thing this sequence does not do. It does not open by choosing a product. Which platform holds the record is the last decision here rather than the first, because what the second step finds changes the answer completely.

Evidence

What we can show, and what we will not print.

This is the one page in this set whose strongest evidence is its own subject rather than an adjacent one, which makes it the page where it matters most to be precise about what the evidence is.

  1. Vizitor, a workplace platform we built

    In daily use across 500+ workplaces in 15+ countries, covering visitor management, contractor management, meeting rooms, mailroom, desk booking and front-desk operations.

    Viithiisys took it from a seed-stage idea to the product it is now, which makes it direct evidence of building for many buildings at once rather than adjacent evidence. The two figures are Vizitor's own current published numbers, not results measured on the engagement.

  2. Milo, a time-critical operational sequence

    A driver-facing system where a coordination delay has immediate operational cost.

    Fleet operations rather than workplace operations. It is here for the coordination constraint, which is the same one, and for nothing else.

Vizitor publishes its own figures for lobby wait and audit coverage. Those are its current numbers rather than the engagement's results, so they are not repeated here.

Deliberately absent

Vizitor is a product, and a product's published numbers are not an engagement's outcomes. These are the figures a competing page would put here, and we cannot source any of them for this work.

  • Any reduction in reception time at your sites.
  • A compliance or incident figure, before or after.
  • A number of sites brought onto one record, because we have not published one.
  • A payback period, which depends on how many sites there are and how bad the worst one is.
  • A time to answer who is on site, which would be a claim about your systems rather than ours.
  • An adoption rate, which is the figure that actually decides whether any of this worked.
What you keep

What you have at the end.

Artefacts rather than a platform. Every one of these should survive us leaving, and should survive a site changing its mind about a door.

  1. One record of who was on site, per site, per day

    Searchable and exportable, holding the same fields whichever door the person came through and whoever was standing at it.

  2. A per-site profile your site can edit

    Hours, doors, who authorises, what the induction covers. Changed by the people at that site, without a ticket to anyone.

  3. A contractor and induction register for the estate

    Current status per person per site, so "is this person cleared to work here" has one answer rather than one answer per folder.

  4. A roll call that can be produced in two minutes

    Including the arrivals the desk never handled, which is the only reason anybody kept the paper book in the first place.

  5. Retention and deletion rules that actually run

    A visitor record is personal data, and how long you may keep one has a different answer in each country you operate in. Each site should be running a decision somebody made on purpose rather than keeping everything until somebody asks.

Adjacent work

What this connects to, and who builds it

Workplace operations overlaps several more specific pieces of work. Where one of these describes your blockage better, it is the better place to start.

Start here

Tell us what happens at the site least like head office.

Describe one morning at the gate or the early shift. A senior engineer will tell you what must be identical across sites, and whether this is a project or a page of settings.

Talk to a senior engineerOr start with a Broken Workflow Assessment
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