Archibus SaaS / Space
Space / Space Inventory
Space Inventory Methods: Overview
Archibus offers a few choices for generating space inventories. The business results of the methods are the same: an accounting of your space, how space is used by departments, and its efficiency (building performance). You will need to choose an approach that best suits the operations at your company.
Note: Group inventory and workspace transactions are not available with the Archibus Space module.
Group Inventory vs. Room Inventory
For many sites, simply outlining the area that a department occupies on a floor is sufficient; these sites do not need the locations of individual walled offices, but only the overall area that the department occupies. With this departmental area (known as a group inventory), you can determine total departmental area in a facility, charge back departments for their use of this space, and gain an understanding how space is used by the departments of the organization. Analyses such as department stack plans, highlighted departmental areas on floor plans, and department analysis reports are available.
With a room inventory, you develop the individual rooms (either in the database only or in a CAD plan) and you assign each room to a department. If you have an open plan with workstations, you can decide if you want to inventory just the open plan or the individual workstations. You determine departmental areas by running reports that sum room areas according to their departmental assignment.
Although both room and group inventories produce the same departmental analyses, a room inventory:
- provides a level of detail that can be used with other Archibus applications. For example, you need to know the exact room locations for maintenance work and room reservations; a general departmental inventory does not track this level of detail.
- is a pre-requisite for a personnel inventory.
- can take advantage of workspace transactions, which capture and track changes to those rooms, split rooms for multiple ownership, assign employees to more than one room, and so on.
Mixing Group and Room Inventories
Note that it is possible to mix room and groups in your space inventory. For a certain floor, you might already have a CAD plan with room polylines, which your CAD specialist can easily convert into Archibus rooms; however, for other floors, you do not have this information and quickly outlining group polylines is your best solution. Similarly, within a floor you might have certain rooms that you carefully track with individual room records, such as expensive office space or laboratories. For other areas on the floor, a departmental group boundary may suffice. Perhaps, you'll start off with a mixture of rooms and groups, and eventually develop the rooms for each group departmental area.
The Space Inventory and Space Chargeback applications consider both rooms and groups in their departmental area and chargeback calculations. Therefore, it is possible to mix these levels throughout your inventory and still generate meaningful analyses.
For information, see Developing a Space Inventory that has Both Rooms and Groups.
Room Inventory List vs. Room Plan
Depending on the resources available at your site, if you are developing a room inventory you can decide to track your rooms in room lists only, or in room lists along with room plans--CAD floor plan drawings that depict the boundaries of each room, with each room boundary connected to a database record describing the room. For information, see Comparing Room Lists and Room Plans
Note: Group inventories do not offer this choice. Group inventories are based on CAD drawings.
Room Inventory Level of Detail: Open Plans, Rooms, and Workstations
Another decision that users of a room inventory must make is how to track situations in which you have an open plan with workstations: do you want to track the open plan as one big room, do you want to track the individual workstations as rooms, do you want to track both the open plan and the individual workstations. As with deciding between a group or room inventory, or a room plan and a room list, you can started with the quickest solution to implement and then gradually add detail as necessary.
The Archibus Space domain is set up to establish any combination of open plan and workstation situations and still produce accurate area and chargeback calculations. For information, see Open Plans with Workstations.
Tracking Teams
You may wish to track space in terms of seats, rather than walled areas The team space features enable you to assign a room with one or several seats to a team, which in turn is associated with a department. With team space, you do not need to associate each room with an organization; instead, you assign a team. Although often used with open floor plans, team space can be used with any room configuration.
Typically, you mix team space with a traditional room inventory. For example, you might have a set of executive offices and secretarial stations that you track with a traditional room inventory as these employees always occupy these spots. The rest of the floor is occupied by open work areas which you can track with team space.
For information, see Team Space Overview
Room Inventory: Using Workspace Transactions
As part of developing a room inventory, users can take advantage of workspace transactions, which store:
- room attributes that are subject to change
- room attributes that include more than one value per room, such as division, department, proration, category, type, and employee.
- a history of attribute changes by applying date ranges to those attributes. In this way, the Workspace Transactions table is linked to requests for attribute changes, such as employee moves and department claims.
For information on workspace transactions, see: