Heritage
A company founded in 2023, on work that started long before it
The platform is new. The method underneath it is not, and the distinction matters, because a claim about twenty-five years of measurement means nothing unless you can say where those twenty-five years happened.
The timeline
1998: a method, commissioned by a ministry
Rogier Woudsma develops a methodology and research instrument for systematically measuring workplace occupancy, commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.
2001: RRIS, alongside the Center for People and Buildings
The work is brought into RRIS, in the same year the Center for People and Buildings is founded in Delft to bridge research and practice.
2001–2024: thousands of studies
Measurement across the Netherlands and Belgium for ministries, municipalities, universities and commercial organisations. The Dutch central government is the largest single client.
2024: the activities move to Workplaced
Rogier brings the activities and the accumulated expertise into Workplaced. The research logic is kept; the technology is rebuilt from scratch.
April 2025: the platform goes live
The activities moved across before the product existed rather than after, which is why the method is older than the company.
What changed, and what did not
Traditional occupancy research required external observers walking a building for days. That is still possible, and for some questions it is still the best instrument. What changed is that it is no longer the only option: an organisation's own people can carry out the observation rounds, with Workplaced supplying the methodology, the software, the study design, the processing and the analysis.
That is the whole difference between a study you commission once and a measurement capability you keep. A method built for the Dutch government became a self-delivered occupancy research model, which is also why measuring twelve buildings no longer costs twelve times measuring one.
The academic line
Professor Nick Nunnington, co-founder and advisor, has been running corporate real estate education internationally since 1998 and is a co-author of Corporate Real Estate Asset Management: Strategy and Implementation (Routledge). The models the platform uses are the models he teaches and examines, which is an unusual position for a software company and the reason the science page can be checked rather than asserted.
Workplaced also works with IFMEC Academy, a centre of expertise in Facility and Enabling Management since 1994, with Workplaced represented on its board. IFMEC issues its own qualifications and runs its own curriculum, admissions and examination.