Equant Equals Significant Savings with a Flexible Workplace Program Powered by AgilQuest`s OnBoard Solution.

When you have almost ten thousand employees located in 160 countries who provide services in more than 220 countries you would expect to need a considerable amount of office space.
For Equant, a subsidiary of France Telecom that provides business communications service to some of the world`s largest companies, office space cost management was proving to be an expensive problem. Equant maintains offices in the world`s financial capitals, where, especially in cities such as New York, London, Paris, Singapore and Hong Kong, rent can be extremely expensive. What`s more, many offices that Equant maintains are nearly empty as employees are with clients.

The task at Equant was, in the words of General Services Vice President Russell Jay, "to optimize office space and save significant amounts of money while minimizing the impact on employee productivity.”

It was Amy Teklinsky, the General Services Project Manager for Equant, to whom the task of devising the details of Equant`s space-sharing project was delegated. It was also Teklinsky and her counterpart, Jennifer Sladicka of Equant Sourcing, who took the step of partnering with AgilQuest, a company specializing in efforts to save money for their clients by better managing office space. Together AgilQuest and Equant developed FlexPlace, a brand of reservable desking system that allows employees to reserve desks ahead of time in smaller office facilities rather than leaving their own personal desks vacant when business takes them away from the office. As Teklinsky explained it, "We were able to close our Dulles Corner offices (near Washington Dulles Airport) and have FlexPlace available here in Oak Hill, Virginia, so that we could effectively fit all of the employees into this one location using our reservable FlexPlace desks. Also, in our Atlanta location we were able to close three floors of space and consolidate our staff on the two remaining floors where we can accommodate both fixed and mobile professionals.” The AgilQuest system of desk reservations not only saves the company money in rent on office space, but it allows costs to be cut in the areas of heating, lighting, and the cleaning of offices since Equant knows they will not actually be in use at a given time.

The FlexSpace project has achieved more than its goals and been a definite money-saving success for Equant. Jay explained, "We set some pretty aggressive targets for ourselves that were approaching $40 million dollars over an approximate two-year period. We are the ones pioneering this alternative workforce/workplace strategy in the France Telecom group. With that goal in mind we are on track to deliver substantially to our financial objectives.”

As Jay considers it, "AgilQuest is a critical component. Their software allows the FlexPlace system to operate and their service went well beyond expectations.” Amy Teklinsky had been impressed by AgilQuest`s presentation and championed the relationship within Equant because she "wanted to have a professional offering." When AgilQuest came in and worked on FlexSpace, they were put on a tight deadline that was necessary because of project deadlines that required FlexPlace to be in place. "There was less than a month for AgilQuest to get three sites prepared, the software up, and our data feeds available,” she recalls, "and the FlexPlace system was ready by the end of the month for us to train the first users. It was a very aggressive deployment.”

Russell Jay gave "extraordinarily high marks” to the AgilQuest management team with whom he worked, and was especially impressed that "they are literally living the AgilQuest promise and vision. They came here, they spent time here, and they partnered with us to resolve problems. It isn`t like they walked in, dropped a brochure, did a PowerPoint presentation, and left a contract if we wanted to sign it. I have been impressed with the fact that they really partnered with us in making this a success. They walked the talk, which is really important to me.”

Equant sees opportunities for FlexPlace to develop further in the future, making business more efficient and better suited to the “virtualized office environment.” FlexPlace realistically helps improve operating costs for Equant and thus supports Equant’s ability to provide its customers with the best value for their money and for its employees a state of the art workplace management system.