Sustainability & Risk / Sustainability Assessment

Sustainability Assessment: Application Overview

The Archibus Sustainability Assessment application provides tasks and reports for managing the process of assessing the environmental sustainability (also know as the "green" state) of the rooms and equipment in your facilities.

With this application, you can document and evaluate how your site is meeting its environmental goals. This can help you improve the balance between people, infrastructure, facilities, and their effect on the environment. Attention to a building’s environmental factors can often lead to long-term cost savings, as well as improve the quality of the work environment

To perform an environmental sustainability assessment, you visit your locations and equipment items and ask such questions as: 

• Is this promoting good air quality?
• Is this conserving energy?
• Is this conserving natural resources?
• Does this meet government environmental regulations?
• Are waste products being disposed of properly? Are they hurting the environment?

You then analyze your results, determine problem areas, and work to improve the environmental sustainability of these problem areas.

General Procedure for Sustainability Assessment

1. A business process owner sets up the necessary data for using the Sustainability Assessment application:

• develops and maintains the facility background data required for working with the application.
• creates a project for organizing condition assessment data.
• defines assessment classifications
• defines questions to be completed by the field assessor

2. An assessment manager creates assessment records for a project and prepares for a field survey. This entails:

• Creating assessment items for a project based on rooms and/or equipment items.
• Assigning to one or more inspectors the task of assessing these items.

3. Field assessors travel to each room or equipment item, note its environmental sustainability, and record it. There are a few ways to do this:

• use the Archibus Assessments mobile app to record data on a mobile device or smart phone. When field assessors sync their mobile devices, they receive assigned assessment items for issued projects. When they are through, they sync to upload the assessment items to the Archibus database
• use a laptop. For information, see Using a Laptop for Field Assessments.
• use tablets. For information, see Using a Tablet PC for Field Assessments.
• use paper and pencil to record observations for later entry into the system. For information, see Using Printed Forms for Field Assessments.

4. At any time in the assessment process, the assessment manager can update the assessment items.
5. Optional: Cost estimators or assessment managers review the assessments and estimate the costs of resolving assessment items.
6. Optional: As the project progresses, the assessment manager can choose to update the project status by updating the Project Status field with values such as: CREATED, REQUESTED, REJECTED, APPROVED, IN PROCESS, IN PROCESS/ON HOLD, STOPPED, CANCELED, COMPLETED.
7. Assessment managers generate and review the following reports in order to review the environmental sustainability rating and facility condition index, which will help them prioritize the items that need addressing, Some of these reports also present estimated resolution cost (if you chose to define it in step 5).

• Scoreboard
• Assessment Project Statistics by Location
• Assessment Items with Sustainability Ratings Greater than 25
• Open Energy Issues
• Building Sustainability Summary

8. Based on review and analysis of the assessment data, assessment managers oversee the resolution of deficiencies.

• If you do not have the Corrective Maintenance application, you can document the planning, scheduling, and budgeting of assessment items by setting the various Status values. See Addressing Assessment Deficiencies.
• If you have the Archibus Corrective Maintenance application, you can generate maintenance service requests to address deficiencies. See Addressing Assessment Deficiencies with Maintenance Service Requests.

9. When the issue has been resolved, assessment managers can verify the completed assessments to ensure that they have been properly addressed and closed out. They can also enter the cost of completed assessment items.

• Complete and Verify Assessments
• Enter the Actual Costs of Assessment Items

10. Assessment managers and other analysts can analyze the assessments and their resolutions with a series of reports:

• Operational Reports
• Management Reports
• Operational Reports (Drawings)