Mapping success (part 1)

Brainmove advises companies on how to set up their offices. To do that, you first need to know what’s there. Sounds simple. In practice it’s a spreadsheet per building, a floor plan in a folder nobody can find, and a facility manager who knows it ‘roughly’.

Brainmove wanted one place for all of it. We built Braincount: a web application to manage, draw and count office infrastructure. BMW is one of the organisations using it.

This is part 1: the foundation. The counting and the numbers are in part 2, starring VRT.

Braincount is multi-tenant. It sounds like a real-estate term, and honestly, it works like one. Every organisation rents its own locked floor in the same building, with its own logo, colours, users and data. BMW sees BMW, VRT sees VRT, and nobody peeks at the neighbours.

For Brainmove, it’s one platform to maintain. For the client, it feels like a tool made just for them. Both are true.

Everything lives in one clear tree: buildings, floors, rooms and the furniture inside them. Desks, chairs, lockers, whiteboards. Each room gets a type, a surface area and a capacity, and the tool does the maths per workspace.

Team moving to the second floor? You change it in one place, not in five spreadsheets that each have their own version of the truth.

A list is handy, but an office isn’t a list. Managers upload the floor plan of every storey, and from then on everything is visual: click a room to see what’s in it, zoom in down to the desk.

Admins get drawing tools on top. Draw rooms and zones, place and drag desks, measure distances, all directly on the plan. No architecture degree required. A steady hand on the mouse does help.

Then BMW knows what’s there and where it is. That’s the foundation. What you do with it next (counting, colouring, exporting) is in part 2, where VRT gets the tablet out.