Assets / Asset Portal / Background Data

Background Data: Process Overview

Use the Assets / Asset Portal / Background Data process to establish fundamental data about your standards and facility.

Geographical, Space, and Organizational Hierarchies

When entering your equipment and furniture assets, you typically want to also enter the location for the asset, and perhaps the division or department that uses the asset. If your geographical. location, and organization data has not been defined using another Archibus application, you can use the Background Data tasks to do so.

• Developing Geographic Data -- Define geographic regions, countries, regions, states, cities, and sites for your equipment.
• Developing Locations -- Define sites, buildings, floors, and rooms. If you intend on depicting your telecom and equipment assets on a room plan, be sure to develop a room plan in CAD.
• Developing the Organizational Hierarchy -- Define Business Units, Divisions, and Departments. An organization is often divided into business units, which are composed of divisions. Divisions, in turn, are composed of departments. However, not all organizations use this three-level hierarchy, and instead might have just departments and divisions. You can define the units that are relevant to the way you manage your furniture and equipment assets.

Standards Data

The Background Data tasks focus on establishing fundamental standards data about your office, facility, and telecom equipment, and tagged furniture. Standards can help you track, manage, and update your equipment, tagged furniture and furniture standards inventories.

If you develop standards that are associated with a drawing block, you can asset insert or populate to create equipment, tagged furniture, or jack asset symbols in a CAD floor plan drawing.

You can develop standards using the following tasks:

• Define Equipment Standards
• Define Jack Standards
• Define Furniture Standards
• Define Software Standards
• Define Faceplate Standards
• Define Punch Block Standards
• Define Patch Panel Standards
• Define Cable Standards
• Define Cable Types
• Define Telecom Hierarchy Levels

Classifications

Classifications are categories of building elements and systems (such as Mechanical, Concrete, Electrical) that you can use to manage your equipment assets. When performing a condition assessment on your equipment items, you can use these categories to organize your assessment data. See Defining Classifications for Assessment Items.

You can review the Classification Codes used at your site by selecting the Background Data / Classifications task. You can export the data to a paginated report, or to a spreadsheet.