See your business working, live

What is Live Workplace?

Live Workplace is a moving picture of your business. It looks like your building, drawn from above at an angle, with people at their stations and the work itself travelling between them: samples in a lab, orders in a kitchen, pallets in a warehouse, cars in a garage.

It is not a video and it is not a mock up. Every person, item and number on screen comes from what your business system records as it happens. When a job arrives, it appears at goods in. When someone starts it, they pick it up and carry it to the next station. When a machine goes down, its station turns red and the work queues up behind it.

Most leadership teams already have the data to know where work is stuck. The trouble is that it sits in reports and dashboards that take time to read. Live Workplace turns the same data into something you understand in a glance, the way you would if you could walk the floor.

Bottlenecks and backlogs at a glance

Each station has its own limits, set by you: how long a queue can get, or how long the oldest job can wait, before the station turns amber and then red. Piles of work build up where it is actually waiting, so the bottleneck is the place on screen with the most in front of it.

A panel beside the picture names the station where work is most stuck, with how many jobs are waiting, how many were finished in the last hour and the average wait. A Focus bottleneck button moves the view to it. Counts along the side show the numbers your business cares about, such as work in today, waiting, overdue, machines down and work finished today, with a live activity feed below.

If you want the reasoning behind this, our answer on how to see bottlenecks in your business in real time explains why a bottleneck is easier to spot as a queue than as a row in a report.

Click anything to see the numbers behind it

The picture is the overview. The detail is one click away:

• A station shows what is waiting and in progress, the oldest wait, how many were done in the last hour, the average wait, who works it, the limits that turn it amber and red, and the queue in order. A broken station also shows when the engineer is due
• An item shows the customer, its turnaround, when it arrived, where it is now and its journey so far, with the time it spent at each station
• A person shows their role, what they are doing and where

Rush jobs are marked and jump the queue, and each turnaround has its own colour, so you can see at a glance whether the work stuck at a station is urgent.

A TV on the shop floor or in reception

Live Workplace runs in a web browser, so it works on any screen that can open a web page. Put it on a TV on the shop floor and the team sees the same picture as leadership: where the queue is, what is overdue and which machine is down. Put it in reception and visitors see a business that knows exactly what it is doing.

It also works on a laptop or a phone for the director who is out of the building, and the scene follows the working day, so it is busy in the morning and quiet once everyone has gone home.

Remote teams in one picture

Not everyone works in the building. In a build for your business, a remote team member, such as a reviewer working from home, appears in the picture when your system shows them working on something. The people on site and the people at home are in one view of the work, without anyone installing monitoring software.

The lab demo shows the people on site. Remote staff are part of what we build for you around your own systems, rather than something the demo shows today.

No extra tracking and no productivity scores

Live Workplace only shows what your systems already record: a job booked in, a job started, a job finished, a machine marked as down. It adds no cameras, no screen recording, no keystroke logging and no location tracking, and it gives nobody a productivity score.

In the demo, the people on screen are roles, such as an analyst or a prep technician, rather than named individuals. A build for you can work the same way. It is still information about your staff, so tell your team what the screen shows and why before it goes live. Our answer on seeing what a remote team is working on without monitoring software covers what the ICO says about monitoring workers.

Try the live lab demo

The demo is Pendle Analytical Laboratories, a fictional water, soil, food and materials testing lab in Nelson, Lancashire. You can try it at workplace-demo.varsuite.co.uk: fill in a short form and you are straight in.

Samples arrive at goods in, are booked in, prepared, run on the chromatography system, the metals analyser or the microbiology incubator, checked, certified and stored. A booking clerk, prep technicians, analysts, a quality reviewer, a storage technician and a lab manager do the work, and a courier brings samples in. Samples with a question for the client wait on a query shelf.

The demo has its own controls, so you do not have to wait for something to go wrong:

• Break an instrument and watch the work back up behind it, then Fix it
• Add rush job and watch it jump the queue
• Flood intake to see a backlog build
• change the speed to see a whole working day in a few minutes

Every visitor gets their own private copy, so nothing you do affects anyone else. Every business, person and client in the demo is fictional, and its data is simulated.

Which businesses is it for?

Any business where work moves through stations and can get stuck on the way. That includes:

• laboratories: samples from goods in to certificate
• manufacturing: jobs between machines, assembly and inspection
• warehousing: pallets from goods in to put away, pick, pack and dispatch
• garages: cars from check in to the ramp, parts, the valet and handover
• food production and takeaways: orders from the till to prep, the grill or the fryer, packing and the driver

The lab is the demo you can try today. For any other kind of business we build your scene for you, from your own building, stations and roles, so it looks like your place rather than a generic one.

Built around your own systems and data

Live Workplace is a layer on top of the systems you already run. It listens for the events that matter: a job arrived, moved, started or finished, a machine went down or came back, someone picked up a task. Those can come from your own job management, ERP, lab, warehouse or order system, or from a business system we build for you.

Where a system can send events or be read through an API, we connect to it directly. Where it cannot, we work out the next best source with you, such as an export or a database it already writes to. In the demo, a simulator plays the part of your system.

We build each scene for one business: your building, your stations, your roles, the limits that turn a station amber or red, the counts you care about and the words your team uses. It is a tailored build, so we quote once we know your business and what it needs to connect to.