Abstract: A leading supplier of office automation equipment is taking advantage of a move to outside London to build offices suitable for office automation. Lighting, heating, cabling and power supply considerations have all been taken into account. An expert system will be used to decide the location of people within the building.

Keywords: data processing, office automation, office design, ergonomics.

Building for the automated office by KATHY LAWRENCE

A s a leading supplier in the office automation market, Rank Xerox has to take the design of its own

offices very seriously. The move of its European headquarters from various locations around London, to a brand new site about 40 miles west of the capital, is therefore providing an excel- lent opportunity for the office giant to put the most modern OA techniques into practice.

At the moment the new Rank Xerox building is no more than a muddy field and an artists’s impres- sion. By the time it is finished, around the middle of 1986, it will be one of the most modern offices in Europe. Ergonomic and technical considera- tions have been worked into the design, and Rank Xerox has even developed its own expert system to plan the deployment of staff - num- bering about 800 when the building is full - according to status and re-

quirements.

The site

The site at Marlow was chosen be- cause it is reasonably close to London airport, and because a survey found that 70% of the staff who are likely to transfer to the new offices already lived in the area. Set on the River Thames, Marlow is a delightful little town which has found it needs to attract some new industry to survive. Consequently a small number of offices and warehouses are springing up along the bypass, some distance out of town. The Rank Xerox build- ing will be one of these. In common

24 0011-684W85/020024-02$03.00 0 1985 Butterworth &Co (Publishers) Ltd. data processing

with many companies that are leaving the centre of London for a more rural position, the staff at Rank Xerox will find themselves a drive away from local facilities, such as shops, but working in pleasant offices in a pretty setting.

The office block will be built in

four storeys, like a flat-topped pyra- mid, around courtyards. There will be half a million square feet of space for a total of 800 people when the building is finished, and the total cost is estimated at around &l$M.

The automated office

The aim of Rank Xerox in designing these offices is to cater for needs into the next century, as well as possible given the uncertainty of how office

products will develop. The company wants to improve productivity of staff, rather than increasing numbers as workloads grow, and to this end is

willing to invest about &lOOOO per person in workstations with Ethernet connections. A total of about 850 workstations is envisaged, plus other equipment such as printers, and likely later additions such as OCR equip-

ment. As well as local networking in-

house, the company wants links to its other sites, not just in the UK, but worldwide, including the headquar- ters at Stamford, Connecticut in the USA. So as well as standard British Telecom lines there will be satellite communications out of the building.

Peter Langford, who has been closely involved in the design of the new building, estimates the cabling requirement at 2% miles for Ether-

off ice automation

There will be 800 people in the finished building, all supplzed with workstations.

net, plus all the British Telecom wires. He has found the best way to deal with all this cable is to put it

under the carpet. False flooring will be fitted throughout the building, with cables coming up through carpet tiles where required. If a workstation is moved, the carpet tile is put back and another one lifted. More compli- cations are added by the requirement for power lines - everyone is expec- ted to have four or five sockets at their workstation. The electricity cables will also run through the false floor- ing, but will have to be kept well away from the data cables, for fear of interference.

Obviously false flooring is easy to design into a building, but what about companies who are not building their own offices, and still want to auto-

mate? Surprisingly, says Langford, it’s the companies in old, Victorian buildings that have a better chance. The ceilings in these buildings are so high that a false floor can be built in beneath the ceiling on most levels. It’s the newer buildings with lower ceil- ings that will have the real problems.

Inside the offices, special ‘uplight- ing’ will be used to cut down glare on \‘DU screens. This is lighting which is projected onto the ceiling and then reflected into the office.

To solve the problem of overheat-

ing from all the electronic equipment in use, a system of heat pumps will remove the heat, and take it elsewhere in the building for use if needed.

Staff at Rank Xerox are not known to be keen on open plan offices. At the same time the planners want the building to be as flexible as possible. The compromise solution is to be floor-to-ceiling moveable partitions. Both these and the uplighting are already in use experimentally in one of the London offices, and appear to be successful.

Places for people

Actually putting the 800 staff in to the building, bearing in mind who they work with, their place in the hier-

archy and so on is a task of fairly

major proportions. Rank Xerox has attacked this problem by making it an

opportunity to try out an expert system approach, using the Xerox 8000 machine and Interlisp-D, which the organization markets as an arti- ficial intelligence tool. Given the guidelines on who needs what space and which colleagues, the system comes up with a floor plan, which, with adjustments, should finally suit everybody. Linked with, say, the personnel database, this could be- come a very powerful tool.

Expert systems will be used more and more within the office at Rank Xerox according to Phil Judkins,

manager in charge of the move. He sees expert systems allowing secre- tarial staff to take on more responsibi- lities, such as looking after relocation and recruitment. How staff will take to the idea is yet to be seen, although as he acknowledges, working in a company such as Rank Xerox, staff are used to seeing a rapid turnover of

technology on their desks. What will be interesting, he says, is seeing how people cope with what is really a very intelligent assistant, but without the usual human flaws.

Office of the future

For once it looks like the vision of ‘the office of the future’ will come to fruition. Building from scratch gives Rank Xerox an advantage over many in designing in the features of an automated office that just do not fit in to many ordinary offices. The careful planning that has gone into designing the building and offices, combined with the care that Rank Xerox likes to take of its staff - like the senior executives’ gymnasium at the London office - should make the Marlow office a very pleasant place to work. How all this effort will all affect productivity remains to be seen. q

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