Most companies require physical space for their operations, such as to house their employees, manufacturing operations and/or inventory. The costs of acquiring and maintaining space can be significant, especially for large or disperse organizations with a large work force. Further, those needs may be dynamic, changing based on business cycles, economic or environmental factors, etc. Accordingly, it is important that space be utilized efficiently to realize both direct and indirect savings, such as lower real estate costs, utility costs, taxes, etc. For example, a company which owns two buildings capable of housing 1000 employees each may be incurring unnecessary costs if each building is actually only be utilized by 500 employees at any given time. In this case, it may make sense for the company to consolidate to one building or downsize to eliminate excess capacity, and thereby lower costs.
Unfortunately, space utilization is dynamic and varies over time making the measurement of utilization difficult. Work schedules, business cycles, productions schedules, holidays and other extraneous events all combine to cause fluctuations in utilization. Therefore, to understand utilization of a space, once needs to monitor, measure and analyze utilization over time.