Life sciences technology and innovation are moving at breakneck speed. Meanwhile, workforce preferences have evolved more in the past few years than in the previous two decades. To compete, biopharmaceutical companies must not only use capital efficiently and operate with agility but also provide inspiring workplaces that attract and retain talent. Wherever your organization is in its growth trajectory, your facilities can support your talent and business strategies— if you’re armed with the right data.

Real estate and facilities professionals have historically relied on traditional data points to analyze life sciences space performance, including square footage per person, floor load capacity, column spans, filtration and ventilation, and even proximity to other research institutions. Now, outdated real estate metrics must be replaced with custom data that is meaningful for your unique culture, talent strategy and operating goals.

Data-driven insights with an eye on the future can help you align your real estate and facilities with your business vision, strategy and talent needs, while also demonstrating how corporate real estate contributes to the overall success of the business and its stakeholders.

As your biopharmaceutical organization matures, real estate and facilities can accumulate—especially if you’ve had mergers or acquisitions. Rather than becoming a drag on overall business performance, your real estate and facilities can be used to advance your business vision and goals.

For example, with hybrid working, you may need only a fraction of the office space you currently hold. Laboratory or production spaces may be inefficient or poorly located for talent recruitment purposes, or not as close to customers as you would prefer.

By analyzing occupancy data generated by building technologies, and combining it with business growth projections, you’ll be able to make accurate forecasts about the space you need and avoid waste. Wireless sensors can generate data about when and where employees are using your workplaces, allowing you to make data-driven decisions about efficient workplace layouts.

Utilization levels can be especially helpful in pursuing workspace strategies for life science companies. For example, you may determine that you should relocate or consolidate administrative spaces to back-office areas to free up square footage for R&D.

You also can use data and analytics tools to evaluate your real estate portfolio holistically on the basis of productivity, flexibility, costs, talent recruitment and retention and other factors. Today’s facility and workplace technologies make it possible to capture and analyze a wide range of corporate real estate data and integrate it with business data to drive portfolio decisions.

Corporate real estate efficiency metrics to explore:

• What is our total corporate real estate cost per person?

• What is our real-time space utilization?

• How accurate is our capital planning?

• Which of our facilities operate most efficiently and sustainably?