About FlowAnalytics

FlowAnalytics is the analytics part of the Workplace Manager. It shows how your offices are actually used, based on what people book and what the sensors measure, so that decisions about how much space you need, and how well that space fits the way people work, can be made on measured data.

This article explains what FlowAnalytics contains, where its data comes from, who can see it, what needs to be configured before the figures are complete, and how a dashboard page is built up. The dashboards themselves are described in a separate chapter each.

What FlowAnalytics is

Select FlowAnalytics in the left menu to expand it. Each entry in the menu opens a page, and most pages contain several dashboards as tabs:

• Portfolio — the whole portfolio in one view
• Office — utilization, the utilization simulator, no-shows and attendance for one office
• Rooms — occupancy and room fit for meeting rooms
• Department — how different departments use the office
• User — attendance and no-shows per individual. This page is restricted and is not shown to every administrator
• Climate — indoor climate measurements
• Custom Dashboards — dashboards you build yourself from the same set of widgets

Every dashboard is built to answer one question rather than to present a collection of charts for you to interpret. The figures on all dashboards except the two on the User page are aggregated and do not identify individuals.

Which dashboard answers which question

Use this table to find the right dashboard before you start filtering.

Where the data comes from

FlowAnalytics reports on three kinds of data. Each says something different, and knowing which one is behind a figure is what tells you how much weight it carries.

Booking data

Desk, room and parking bookings made in the Flowscape apps, together with meetings from a connected calendar system such as Microsoft 365, Exchange, Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace. Booking data tells you what was reserved and by whom.

Sensor data

Data from the devices installed in the office, covering two different things.

Presence and counting devices report whether a space is in use and how many people are in it: desk presence, room presence, people counting in larger rooms and open areas, and footfall counters at entrances. Video bars in equipped meeting rooms report presence and people count through the same integration.

Climate sensors report temperature, humidity and CO₂ for the space they are installed in. These feed the Climate Overview dashboard rather than the utilization figures. The climate sensor also include motion detection, so one device can report both indoor climate and whether the room is occupied.

Sensor data tells you what actually happened in the space, independently of what was booked.

Check-in data

Where check-in is activated, the person confirms their booking on arrival. Check-in is a function of the Flowscape system rather than a measurement, so it also reports on assets that have no sensor.

How much of an office is covered by each source decides how complete its figures are. Where an asset has neither a sensor nor check-in, FlowAnalytics knows what was booked and nothing about whether it was used, and the charts show that share separately. See the article on data quality and troubleshooting for how to read a dashboard where coverage is incomplete.

Who can see what

Access to FlowAnalytics is controlled in two steps: the roles set on a user decide which pages appear in the menu, and the offices set on the same user decide which offices those pages cover.

The roles that give access

Three roles cover FlowAnalytics, and each one opens a different part of the menu.

One consequence is worth noting. Global Admin covers everything except the User page, so an administrator who needs the user-level dashboards has to be given FlowAnalytics User Behavior as well. The User page is reached only through that role, which is what keeps the dashboards that name individuals separate from the rest of FlowAnalytics.

Combining roles

A user can hold one role or several, and the pages they see are the pages all their roles allow together. A user with FlowAnalytics Asset Utilization and FlowAnalytics Department Utilization therefore sees both the asset dashboards and Department.

The office selection is set once per user and applies to every role that user holds. It is not possible to grant department figures for one office and asset figures for another. Where scopes need to differ, that is two user accounts rather than two roles.

Roles and office access are both set on the user under Users. For how to do that, see User Roles.

How identifiable the data is

The dashboards on the User page name individuals and every other dashboard is aggregated. Whether the data behind them can identify anyone at all depends partly on the sensor and partly on a setting you control.

Most measurements cannot identify a person under any configuration. Desk presence, room presence, people counting and footfall sensors detect that somebody is there without any way of telling who. No image leaves a vision-based device, and the thermal counter has no camera at all.

Two sources can carry identity: Desk Sense Connect, where the desk is identified through the docking station and the laptop client, and booking data, where a booking is made by a named person. For both of these, what is stored in the database is set at one of three levels:

• User ID. The individual is stored with the data.
• Department only. The department is stored, and the individual is not.
• Neither. The data is stored without user or department.

The setting governs what is written to the database rather than what a dashboard chooses to display, and it decides which dashboards can show anything at all. Department Overview needs at least department level. User Attendance and User No Show need user ID level, and will be empty without it even for an administrator who holds the FlowAnalytics User Behavior role.

The level is set under Company settings, which is reachable only with the Super Admin role. That role is held by the system administrators at Flowscape and is not assigned to customer administrators, so the setting cannot be changed from within your own organization. To change it, contact support@flowscapesolutions.com.

Agree the level before a rollout rather than after it. It determines which dashboards will ever show data, it is the answer to what employee representatives and works councils will ask, and changing it later takes a support request rather than a setting you can reach yourself.

Before you start

FlowAnalytics reads the configuration you have already made elsewhere in Workplace Manager. Where something is missing, a filter has nothing to offer or a card cannot calculate a value.

None of this is required to open a dashboard. A dashboard opened before the configuration is complete simply shows fewer figures.

How a dashboard page is built up

All dashboards follow the same layout, so once you can read one you can read the rest. From the top of the page:

1. Page title and tabs. The tabs across the top switch between the dashboards that belong to the page. On the Office page, for example, the tabs are Office Utilization, Office Utilization Simulator, No Show and Attendance.
2. Filter bar. Sets what the whole page is showing: which office, which asset types, which period, which days and which hours. Which filters appear depends on the dashboard.
3. Saved filters. A filter combination you use regularly can be saved and reapplied per page.
4. Selection summary. A line showing how many assets are included and how many filters are active. Select Expand to see the individual filter values, and Clear all to reset them.
5. AI insights. On several dashboards, a short written reading of the filtered period appears above the cards, pointing out the pattern that matters most in the current selection. Select the arrow to open it in full.
6. Key figure cards. The headline numbers for the period, each with its target, the change against the previous period, and an information icon that explains how the figure is calculated.
7. Charts. The detail behind the cards. Most charts can be shown at different granularity, have a legend you can select to hide and show series, and can be downloaded individually.
8. Settings and Export. At the top right of the page. Settings controls the targets shown on the cards, and Export produces the current view as a file.

The filter bar, saved filters, targets, the AI insights and the export functions work the same way on every dashboard and are described in Filters, targets and exports.