Thought Nuggets: Conference Room Scarcity

The company, I once worked, moved to a brand new building with modern digital system. There is an iPAD hanging outside each conference room to show its reservation status. Employees are now able to reserve the conference rooms online. A great improvement to meeting efficiency you'd say. But, on the contrary, with more conference rooms in the building and online reservation capability, it became harder to book a room for meetings.

Without the reservation capability, people look for an empty conference room at the time of the meeting. Every meeting will have a room till all rooms are occupied. Without reservation, 100% utilization was possible. However, it is not the case with reservation.

With reservation, rooms were reserved ahead of the meetings. Many times, people forget to cancel the reservation with the meeting, or reserve a room before the meeting was confirmed. Waste was generated and meeting room became hard to book at times. Realizing there might not be a room available for meetings, people became more aggressively booking rooms for meetings that might or might not happen in the future. Thus, the vicious cycle starts.

When the cost(online reservation) of a service/goods (conference room) is very low, there is little resistance for the demand to go up. It is easy for the even the slightest demands to feed to each other and cause the service/goods to become scarce. Another factor that will cause the situation to become worse is the un-predictable supply of service/goods. I will write about it in my next blog "thought nuggets: Inventory Chaos".