Predictive Demand Forecasting

How It Works

The forecast combines two things: how busy your building is and how that changes through the year.

• How busy:
  • With measured data: taken from your most recent 13 weeks of measured attendance, so the forecast follows a recent change in how your building is used. Measured attendance comes from sensors, a WiFi integration, or an uploaded badge file (see the table below).
  • Without measured data: taken from the headcount, attendance policy, and adherence rate you enter on the People tab for your teams.
• Seasonal shape: blended from your own building's pattern and the pattern of other buildings in your region, weighted toward the region. A building with no measured history follows the regional pattern alone.
• Day of week: attendance behavior is learned per weekday from your data.
• Your plans: headcount changes and attendance-policy events you add to a scenario are applied on top of the measured baseline.

If your badge data identifies teams, each team gets its own forecast from its own attendance history, and the team forecasts add up to the building's demand line.

Who Can Access Predictive Demand?

Every plan with at least one team set up on the People tab shows a demand forecast. What it is built from depends on the data available for your building:

Setup

The forecast needs at least one team on the People tab with its inputs completed. Sensor, WiFi, and badge data are picked up automatically once that is in place.

• Add your teams and complete their inputs: headcount, attendance policy, adherence rate, arrival pattern, and stay duration for each team. A team missing any of these shows Needs Input and adds nothing to the forecast. These inputs also power event modeling and are the basis of the forecast when no measured data is available.
• Upload badge data (optional): on the People tab, open Badge data and upload a file from your access control system. Two formats are accepted: one row per badge entry (date, time, and a person identifier), or one row per day with the number of distinct people who came in.
• Check your Risk Thresholds page: your capacity and thresholds reflect simulated and measured spaces combined.

What this means for your planning

With predictive demand, you get higher-fidelity visibility into future space needs, making it easier to right-size floors, plan for headcount shifts, and model scenarios with confidence. Your forecasts move with your organization and with the season.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Why does my forecast look different than it did before? The forecast now reads how busy your building is from your most recent quarter rather than the whole past year, and takes its seasonal shape mostly from buildings in your region rather than replaying your building's own past year. A building that changed how it is used in the last year will see the biggest difference.
• What if I'm not a VergeSense customer or don't have enough sensor coverage? Upload a badge data file on the plan's People tab. The forecast is built from your recorded attendance as soon as the upload is applied.
• What if we can't share badge or sensor data? You still get a forecast. It is modeled from the headcount and attendance inputs you enter on the People tab and follows your region's seasonal pattern.
• Does this change anything in Floor Management? No. Floor Management works exactly as it did before. Custom and default capacity behaviors are unchanged.
• Do I need to set a custom capacity for simulated floors? Not unless you want to. If you leave the Capacity field blank in Edit Floor, Predictive Planning will still display the correct capacity figures automatically by rolling up all measured and simulated spaces.