€3+
Eli Lilly Transformed Space Efficiency and Saved €3+ Million with Ronspot
Million Saved
2:1
Employee/Desk Ratio Achieved
400+
Hours Saved Doing Manual Analysis
The Challenge: When Success Becomes the Problem
When rapid growth meets limited space, most companies face an expensive choice: expand or restrict. Eli Lilly found a third option
Eli Lilly’s Cork office was intended to be a flagship office for the company- a state of the art facility designed with a desk for every employee. But by 2023, success had created an unexpected challenge. The team had grown by 35%, with over 1900 employees. By 2025 this number had increased further with 2300 employees now assigned to their Cork office.
With only 1030 desks available, even with hybrid working, every day brought the same uncertainty: Would there be a place to work when employees arrived?
“We were facing a choice no growing company wants to make,” explains the facilities team. Either invest millions in new real estate, or find a way to make the existing space work smarter.
“We didn’t need more space, we just needed a smarter way to use it.”
– Facility Manager, Eli Lilly
The Stakes: More Than Just Square Footage
Beyond the financial implications, Eli Lilly faced operational challenges that threatened their collaborative culture:
- Employee experience: The risk that staff would make unnecessary trips to the office, only to find no available workspace
- Team coordination: Without visibility into colleagues’ schedules, meaningful collaboration happened by chance, not design
- Resource waste: Some zones sat half-empty while other areas experienced overcrowding
- Operational inefficiency: Even catering partners struggled with unpredictable attendance, leading to significant food waste
The facility management team knew they needed more than a desk booking system—they needed a workplace transformation.
How Ronspot Delivered the Transformation
Real-time desk visibility
Employees could view live desk availability through Ronspot’s user-friendly mobile app before leaving home, eliminating wasted trips and arrival anxiety
Flexible desk allocation
Rather than maintaining fixed departmental zones that often sat half-empty, Ronspot enabled a fully bookable layout where all 1,030 desks became available to any employee, maximizing utilisation across the entire office
Coordination tools
The platform provided visibility into colleagues’ booking schedules, allowing teams to align their in-office days for purposeful collaboration rather than leaving it to chance
Workplace Analytics
Ronspot integrated with Lilly access control and HR systems to provide the most accurate view of workplace attendance and space usage, allowing for accurate decisions about day-to-day capacity management and demand planning for the future
An estimated €3+ million in avoided real estate costs by optimising existing space instead of expanding
400+ hours of manual analysis time reclaimed through automated workplace insights
2:1 employee-to-desk ratio achieved without compromising employee satisfaction
Food waste reduced to just 5 surplus meals daily through accurate attendance forecasting
The Mechanics Behind the Success
The system’s analytics identified attendance and usage trends, helping Eli Lilly understand peak demand periods and optimize availability
Ronspot’s intelligent system prevented overbooking while ensuring maximum utilisation, enabling the dramatic shift from 1:1 to 2:1 employee-to-desk ratios
Real-time booking data was shared with operations partners, including catering service Sodexo, enabling accurate demand forecasting that reduced food waste from dozens of surplus meals to just 5 per day
Employees gained complete autonomy over their workspace planning, eliminating the 400+ hours of manual analysis and coordination that facilities teams previously managed
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