Real Property / Strategic Financial Analysis

Four Sources of Costs for Strategic Financial Analysis

The application can summarize large amounts of data effectively. However, you do not need to enter all of this data from scratch to get meaningful analysis results. Most likely, much of this data already exists within your Archibus database or your enterprise. Alternately, you can estimate and forecast costs for cost categories or buildings that you do not currently track.

Remember that you do not need to use all of the metrics for the application to deliver meaningful results. For instance, if you only have the Archibus Space Inventory and Occupancy applications, you can use the Strategic Financial Analysis application to analyze vacancies across buildings and sites. And if you only have the Archibus Corrective Maintenance application, you can use the Strategic Financial Analysis application to analyze and benchmark your maintenance costs for facilities of different types.

See also the Data Flow for Strategic Financial Analysis topic for more details on costs and how they flow to the Strategic Financial Analysis metrics.

Data from other Archibus Applications

Some Archibus applications sum values to the Costs tables (Scheduled Costs and Recurring Costs tables. ) The Strategic Financial Analysis application can incorporate these costs into the unified cost model presented in the Financial Analysis Console. The application can also create cost records for costs recorded in Archibus that are not in the cost tables.

Many other Archibus applications capture capital and operating costs as part of their day-to-day operation, including Portfolio, Projects, Condition Assessment, Corrective Maintenance, Preventive Maintenance, Service Desk, Moves, and Energy. While the use of these applications is optional, the Strategic Financial Analysis application automatically incorporates any costs provided by these other Archibus applications to improve the accuracy of your analyses. The program incorporates actual expenses, such as Work Order costs, and more accurate forecast expenses, such as from detailed work breakdown structures and line item costs for future projects estimated in the Projects application. The application creates cost records when you run the actions of the Strategic Financial Analysis application.

Moreover, other applications, such as the Space Inventory and Occupancy applications, capture values that are used to prorate metrics, such as gross area, rentable area, usable area, occupancy and current occupancy and vacancy. Again, the use of these applications is optional, however when they are present, their values are also automatically used to refine the assumptions and base data.

The Archibus applications stores and summarizes many costs in the cost fields of the various tables. These costs have associated cost categories. Below are a few examples of the many costs that you can track with Archibus:

Activity parameters control the cost categories that are used for generating analysis metrics. The application comes with default settings that your add-in manager can personalize if needed. See Define Application Parameters for Strategic Financial Analysis

If you do not have other products within the Archibus suite, you can create an inventory and develop a lifecycle cost model for your assets within the Strategic Financial Analysis application. Features like Forecast Capital Costs and Forecast Income and Expenses aid in quickly creating this model for each asset.

Imported Data

To improve your estimates, you can import data from other systems using the Archibus Connectors. This data can be costs from financial systems, such as SAP and Oracle, work order data from CMMS systems such as Maximo, or portfolio information from your outsourced real estate provider. The Archibus Connectors can map between different data formats and automate the regular integration of this data. See:

Costs in the Costs Table

You can also import your cost data directly from other sources, either using the Archibus Data Transfer command, or using the Archibus (Connectors. The analysis metrics use the costs and dates in the Scheduled Costs and Recurring Costs tables to determine what costs to apply to each asset in each fiscal year.

Tracking Metrics

Some of the analysis metrics are “rate of change” metrics, meaning that they do not measure a quantity about your assets, but rather how fast that quantity is changing. Examples are Vacancy Variance, Budget Variance and Schedule Variance. Even if a value – such as the absolute vacancy percentage of a building – is entirely within normal bounds, if it is changing rapidly, it still deserves to be flagged so that any issue with that building or asset can be resolved before the key performance indicator falls out of bounds.

For this reason, these “rate of change” metrics do not depend on the inventory data, but instead inspect the tracking metric data that shows the rate of change over time of vacancy or project information.