Workplace planning, decided in minutes

Re-stack your offices in minutes —
with a number your CFO will sign off.

Inquatra turns the four-to-eight-week office re-stacking exercise — the spreadsheets, the AutoCAD overlays, the committee revisions — into a single-digit-minute decision. It finds the best-fit layout across your buildings, scores how well teams sit together, and prices the result as annual saving, 5-year NPV, IRR and payback — with a recorded reason behind every placement.

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~$5M: annual saving identified · reference portfolio
Weeks → minutes: per re-stacking cycle
NPV · IRR · payback: CFO-grade scorecard
Defensible: a recorded reason per placement

Engineered on open-source

Constraint-programming optimiser
Mathematical optimisation
Managed database
Relational storage
Cloud hosting
Cloud compute

The problem

A re-stacking decision worth millions — still made in Excel.

The corporate workplace planning problem is large in money, large in combinatorics, and currently solved by intuition. Inquatra replaces that with constraint programming and corporate-finance methodology.

8–15%

of operating budget

spent on workplace real estate by corporate occupiers^[1]. Re-stacking decisions therefore move material money on the income statement.

4–8wks

of analyst time per cycle

is the typical cost of a single mid-size re-stacking exercise^[2] — spreadsheet versions, AutoCAD overlays, committee revisions. The output is rarely defensible without an audit trail.

10⁶⁰

candidate assignments

for a modest 50-section, 8-floor problem. No person or spreadsheet can weigh this many options — so today the call is made on intuition. It's beyond enumeration; tools that only visualise a stack let a planner guess faster, not decide better.

Today's workplace and space-management tools excel at visualisation and space inventory. None of them couples a real combinatorial optimiser to a CFO-grade financial layer with industry-benchmarked validation. That is the gap Inquatra fills.

Capabilities

Everything a re-stacking decision needs — in one tool.

Not just a stacking visualiser. Inquatra optimises the allocation, scores collaboration, and prices the result — with a recorded reason behind every placement the committee can defend.

Optimised allocation, in minutes

Inquatra weighs cost, disruption and team proximity to find the best-fit layout across your buildings — every team assigned to a specific floor and block, a proven or near-proven optimum, not a guess.

CFO-grade financial scorecard

Every layout is priced: annual lease-exit saving, fit-out cost, 5-year NPV, IRR, payback, and a 3×3 sensitivity grid — validated against industry benchmark bands.

Compare scenarios side by side

Three ready-to-defend options — Cost-first, Balanced, Collaboration-first — produced in one run, each on its own plan tab with a full diff against the as-is plan.

Collaboration scoring

A block-level connectivity graph weighted by real stair and lift travel time turns cross-team meeting demand into a single 0–100 collaboration index — so the human cost of a move is scored, not guessed.

Per-placement reason trail

Every placement has a recorded reason you can show the committee. "Why is this team on Floor 12?" is a one-line answer, not a memory test.

Edit, then re-optimise

Drag teams to floors and blocks, lock the placements you want kept, rebalance a floor's blocks, undo/redo freely — then hand the rest back to the solver. Export any report to Excel, CSV, or print.

Figure 1. The Inquatra three-layer pipeline: supply and demand flow through a constraint-based optimiser, a collaboration-scoring graph, and a financial scorecard, ending in a defensible plan with a full audit trail.

How it works

Three orthogonal layers. One decision.

Each layer uses the right tool for its job, can be reviewed independently, and contributes a piece the committee can defend in writing. The planner picks the solver budget per the stakes of the decision: 30 seconds for triage, 30 minutes for sign-off.

One transparent objective. The optimiser maximises a business-utility score that balances cost, disruption, and collaboration — every trade-off is an explicit, tunable weight, never a black box. Three presets (Cost-first, Balanced, Collaboration-first) re-weight the same trade-offs to produce three defensible answers.

SOLVE

Allocation

Constraint-programming optimiser

A constraint-programming optimiser assigns every section to a specific floor and block, maximising a transparent business-utility objective that balances cost, disruption, and collaboration.

Hard constraints: capacity, adjacency, colocation, location anchors
Soft constraints folded into the objective with named, tunable weights
Configurable solver budget — default 2 min, settable 30 s to 30 min^[7]

Optimality badges

Every run carries its honesty stamp into the scorecard so the room knows what kind of answer they are reading.

PROVEN OPTIMAL NEAR-OPTIMAL · gap % TIME-LIMITED · gap %

Per-constraint audit trail

Every soft-constraint contribution is logged with the rule that fired and the score it changed. "Why is this team on Floor 12?" has a recorded answer — not something a planner has to remember.

Byte-determinism

Runs are deterministic and reproducible — identical inputs produce identical outputs, a hard requirement for any model presented to a finance committee.

SCORE

Collaboration

Connectivity-graph scoring

The chosen layout is evaluated against a block-level connectivity graph weighted by stairs and lift-bank travel time. Cross-team meeting demand is then scored against the realised distances to produce a single collaboration index on a 0–100 scale.

Inter-team travel distances computed once at scenario open
Coverage of meeting-room demand factored into the index
Indexed against industry benchmark bands — low / mid / high

Industry-benchmark bands

Six in-tool KPIs carry low / mid / high band badges with citations on hover. Sources: JLL India Office Outlook 2024^[3], CBRE Workplace Benchmarks 2024^[4], JLL APAC Office Index 2024^[5], Leesman Workplace Insights 2024^[6].

COST

Finance

JavaScript · CFO-grade scorecard

The layout is translated into money: annual lease-exit saving, productivity recovery, fit-out cost, 5-year NPV, payback, IRR, and a 3×3 NPV sensitivity grid. Every number is sourced from a labelled input row — the audit trail is the deliverable, not a side-effect.

Mode A — greenfield: total cost of ownership, sqm-per-seat, benchmark bands
Mode B — re-stacking: savings deltas vs the AS-IS reference plan
NPV at three discount rates × three horizons — nine sensitivity cells

Couple a real combinatorial optimiser to corporate-finance methodology, and the four-to-eight-week stacking exercise compresses into single-digit minutes — while producing a more defensible answer.

— Why Inquatra exists

Results

Three presets. One configurable solver budget. Three defensible answers.

A multi-building reference portfolio across two campus clusters — ~50 floors, 10 sections. Numbers in USD. Indicative magnitudes; values vary slightly run-to-run as the underlying data evolves.

Cost-first · annual saving

~$5.0 M

freeing up to 5 floors + 1 building

Cost-first · 5-year NPV @ 10%

~$18 M

positive across all 9 sensitivity cells

Cost-first · payback

~18 mo

Strong IRR across the horizon

NPV (USD millions) on the Cost-first plan across three discount rates and three horizons.
Discount \ Horizon	3 yr	5 yr	7 yr
6 %	~$11 M	~$22 M	~$31 M
10 %	~$9 M	~$18 M	~$24 M
14 %	~$7 M	~$15 M	~$19 M

Figure 3. NPV on the Cost-first plan across three discount rates × three horizons — all nine cells positive. The 5-year @ 10% cell is the headline figure quoted above.

Metric

Cost-first

Balanced

Collab-first

Optimality badge

PROVEN OPTIMAL

NEAR-OPTIMAL · ~2% gap

PROVEN OPTIMAL

Annual saving

~$5.0 M

~$3.5 M

~$2.0 M

5-year NPV @ 10%

~$18 M

~$13 M

~$7 M

IRR

> 80 %

~65 %

~40 %

Payback

~18 mo

~24 mo

~36 mo

Floors freed

5 floors + 1 bldg

3 floors

1 floor

Blocks freed

Collaboration score · 0–100

~72

~84

~91

The point is not any single number — it is that all three plans are produced from the same input in a single solver budget, accompanied by a 3×3 sensitivity grid, industry-benchmark bands on every KPI, and a per-constraint audit trail.

See it for yourself

Try it live — no sign-up, in your browser.

Start with the one that matters: watch the optimiser turn a campus into three costed, defensible plans. Then climb the ladder — each step adds one capability.

Prefer a guided walkthrough on your own portfolio? Book a call →

★ Flagship demo

Portfolio

The full five-building portfolio — optimised, costed (NPV, IRR, payback) and honest when demand can’t fit. The whole value proposition, end to end.

Launch the demo

Or climb from the basics — each step adds a building and one capability:

01 TowerOne building, ten floors — drag teams onto floors, or allocate by size in a click. 02 Twin TowersTwo connected towers — zones link them and balance the allocation. 03 ClusterThree buildings, multi-block floors and shared meeting rooms — collaboration scored. 04 CampusFour buildings with real placement rules — then three costed plans to trade off.

Or open the full tool

Engineering

Tools that earn their place.

A constraint-programming optimiser, a typed API, a managed database, and a modern web client — each chosen for the job it does, behind a versioned, typed contract^[10].

Optimisation engine

Constraint programming

A constraint-programming engine searches the full space of valid layouts and reports how close each result sits to the best achievable — so every plan arrives with a confidence bound, not just an answer.

Solver API

Solver runtime

A typed HTTPS service wraps the optimiser; the app sends a structured request and reads the solution back.

Managed database

Persistence + auth

Every run stores a full input snapshot, so any analysis can be reproduced exactly from its inputs.

Vanilla JS · System fonts

Frontend

A fast, framework-free web client that loads as a static bundle with zero web-font network requests — the financial layer runs right in the browser.

Connectivity graph

Layer 2 graph

A connectivity graph models how teams sit relative to one another across the campus, distilled into a single collaboration index — so the human cost of a move is scored alongside the financial one.

Pareto presets

Multi-objective

Three preset runs — Cost-first, Balanced, Collaboration-first — produce a clear trade-off frontier the planner can defend in committee.

Sources & benchmarks

The numbers are sourced.

[1] CBRE. Occupier Sentiment Survey. 2024. Workplace operating-cost share by industry.
[2] JLL. Office Outlook. 2024. Typical analyst-time consumption per re-stacking cycle.
[3] JLL. India Office Outlook 2024 Q3. Benchmark bands for sqm-per-seat and cost-per-seat in the India market.
[4] CBRE. Workplace Benchmarks. 2024. Global utilisation %, vacancy %, meeting-seat density bands.
[5] JLL. APAC Office Index 2024 Q2. Regional cross-check on cost-per-seat bands.
[6] Leesman. Workplace Insights. 2024. Collaboration-index bands and meeting-room demand norms.
[7] Solver time budget and solution-quality target are user-configurable per run.
[8] Collaboration scoring uses a standard graph-based connectivity analysis.
[9] Brealey, R., Myers, S., Allen, F. Principles of Corporate Finance. 13e. NPV, IRR, payback methodology applied to Layer 3.
[10] A versioned, typed request/response contract pins the app-to-optimiser interface.

Access

Two ways in

Start free in the browser, or run it on your own portfolio in a private, secured workspace.

Explore free

The full optimiser on demo portfolios, right in your browser. No sign-up, nothing to install — see exactly how it works before you talk to us.

Try a live demo

Your private workspace

Bring your own buildings and run it on your portfolio — your data, kept private to you and no one else. Already onboarded? Log in. New here? Book a call and we'll set you up.

See it on your own portfolio — and leave with a number you can take to the committee.

Book 30 minutes and we'll run the optimiser on your buildings, live. Prefer to explore first? The demo runs right in your browser — no sign-up.