"The system is working so well, we are now recommending it to our own clients," says Thomas Hanszen, BearingPoint`s Managing Director of Real Estate and Facilities Practice.

The system is OnBoard^®, the workplace management solution from AgilQuest Corporation.

Hanszen points out that prior to instituting OnBoard, the average desk at BearingPoint was vacant about 60 percent of the time and, for traveling consultants, as much as 95 percent of the time.

"When you consider," says Hanszen, "that it costs a company about $10,000 per employee to maintain a private desk, and that desk is usually empty, you can quickly calculate how dramatic the savings are when you consolidate that space.

Further savings accrue when you adjust your leasing and real estate to your new needs. That`s why we are using OnBoard and enthusiastically recommending it to our clients."

"OnBoard grew out of the concept of ‘hoteling,’” says John Vivadelli, president and founder of AgilQuest. "Organizations," he continues, "have realized the need to make their workplace as flexible as their workforce. They have come to understand that in an on-demand world, a hugely expensive asset, real estate, can be shared just the way we are accustomed to sharing networks and telephone lines. Today we create bottom line value by treating real estate as a network of places to work.”

"Organizations," says Vivadelli, "spend a lot of money on technology. They spend it on PDA`s, laptops, cell phones, high speed networks. They spend all that to help people do what? To be mobile! Then they say, ‘here is your desk. That`s where you sit.’ That doesn`t make any sense."

BearingPoint is among a growing number of Fortune 500 companies that agree with Vivadelli. After spending millions of dollars on reengineering their processes, they can no longer look at real estate in the same way. Instead, organizations have come to realize they reap great savings if they measure the actual use of their workspace and learn to manage their real estate like any other expensive asset.

BearingPoint`s worldwide hoteling administrator Edith Martinez, says that by using OnBoard her company saves millions of dollars a year and has been able to eliminate thousands of workstations nationwide. BearingPoint is now taking the OnBoard product global to all of its 17,000 employees. "We not only expect additional savings related to managing our existing space," says Martinez, “we know where to add offices and where to close them. In addition, OnBoard gives us a metric by which to measure all of our future real estate decisions."

"It is an issue of Change Management," says BearingPoint`s Hanszen. "When people come to realize how much money they are saving they quickly embrace the concept. And they like the idea of knowing there is a desk waiting for them wherever their travels happen to take them. Just as our mandate is to help customers optimize their corporate real estate, the BearingPoint Real Estate Group realized there was nowhere better to start those savings than right here at home."