A workplace operating platform is a proposed category name for a single system that runs the day-to-day operations of an office: desk booking, meeting rooms, visitor management, parking and the reporting that sits on top. The argument behind the label is that those functions all describe the same three things, people, places and time, so running them in one system produces a more consistent record of how a building is actually used than running four separate tools that each hold a fragment of it.
It is worth being clear that this is an emerging, vendor-coined framing rather than an established analyst category. Buyers and analysts more commonly use workplace management software for the employee-facing layer, IWMS for full real estate, lease and capital project management, and CAFM for building and maintenance operations. If you are writing a requirements document or comparing suppliers, those three terms will get you far more consistent answers from the market. Treat “workplace operating platform” as shorthand for the consolidation argument, not as a category you can reliably shortlist against.