Getting Results with Archibus / Asset Portal application

Furniture Standards Inventory (Asset Portal application)

Office furniture is an important aspect of the overall working environment for staff. Desks, office chairs, lamps, bookcases, conference tables, file cabinets, and so forth are the items that staff use every day and these items need to be available to new hires, replaced when broken, and located when needed.  Having an accurate electronic inventory of furniture items ensures a comfortable and efficient working environment for staff, identifies rooms with too much or too little furniture, and reduces unnecessary furniture purchases.

The Furniture Standards Inventory method focuses not on individually tracking each furniture piece, as does the tagged furniture method, but on producing a count of all the types (standards) of furniture that exist in the facility.

For example, with a furniture standards inventory you do not individually identify the four conference room chairs in room 101 with unique tags, but instead record that four conference room chairs are located in room 101. Since hundreds of the same type of furniture may exist in a facility, and the specific properties of a furniture items do not vary between items of the same standard, many sites find that this level of furniture tracking is sufficient.

To get started with a furniture standards inventory, you can work through the furniture standards task in the Asset Portal / Furniture process, and enter the quantity of each type of furniture found in each room.

Furniture Standards Inventory
Location	Archibus non-SaaS: Assets / Asset Portal / Furniture
Business Result	Electronic inventory of furniture items by type (furniture standard). Cost savings from avoidance of unnecessary furniture purchases. Better use of existing furniture assets as you can determine rooms that are over-furnished and under-furnished.
Used By	Facility Managers Facilities Administrative Staff
Reasons for Automating	Maintain an accurate alphanumeric count of furniture items, which can be further developed through other applications, and is stored in a central repository and available to key stakeholders over a corporate network or Intranet.
Prerequisite Applications	Space Inventory  (specified to the room level)
Results/Reports	Furniture Standards Inventory Furniture Standard Inventory by Building, Floor, Room, Department and Department by Building.
Applications Using the Results of this Application	None
Alternate application	Manage Tagged Furniture Inventory

The following are typical users:

User	Tasks
Facilities Administrative Staff	Enter and maintain furniture data.
Facility Manager	Manage furniture inventory data.

Furniture Standards Inventory with CAD

Some sites may wish to take their furniture inventory a step further and graphically depict their furniture inventory in their floor plan drawings. By laying out the existing space, you can tell how many furniture standards of each type you have.  By laying out the destination space, you can tell how many pieces of each furniture standard type you will need

To develop a furniture plan, a CAD specialist works with the Smart Client's Draw Furniture Standards task to develop furniture plan drawings that are linked to an alphanumeric furniture inventory. The database records and depictions in the CAD floor plan are linked so that an edit to the drawing updates the record, and an edit to the record updates the drawing.

See Also

Asset Portal / Furniture overview