Service Desk / Background Data
Corrective Maintenance / Background Data
Preventive Maintenance / Background Data - Facilities

Develop Background Data

The facility manager creates and manages the background data necessary for the Service Desk, Corrective Maintenance, and Preventive Maintenance applications, entering the necessary location, organizational, and operational information. These applications each include a Background Data process, with all the tasks necessary for developing the required background data.

Although many users find it useful to first establish all background data, you may wish to create the  information on an as-needed basis.

The Service Desk, Preventive Maintenance, and Corrective Maintenance applications can work with an existing space inventory, developed with any of the other Archibus domains. Therefore, if you already have a space inventory, the facility manager can review the data for accuracy and completeness and update it accordingly.

Geographic Locations

Develop the geographic hierarchy (cities, states, countries, and so on) in which your facilities are located. See Developing Geographic Data.

Locations (Space Hierarchy)

You develop the locations in your facility (the space hierarchy) by defining Sites, Buildings, Floors, and Rooms. To further detail the properties of your types of rooms, you can develop the Room Standards table. For details, see Developing Locations.

Organizational Hierarchy

To develop the organizational hierarchy, you complete the Business Units, Divisions, and Departments tables. See Developing the Organizational Hierarchy

Accounts

In addition to using the organizational hierarchy for accounting purposes, you may wish to use the Accounts table, which can function as a cost center. This is convenient for charging work orders and work requests to specific accounts. The Accounts can also be used by or defined in other Archibus domains.

Complete the Account Code field to identify each account. Some sites may wish to establish accounts using unlimited-tier hierarchies

See Entering Accounts.

Budgets and Budget Items

Note: The Budget and Budget Items tasks are not available from Service Desk. You work from Corrective Maintenance or Preventive Maintenance to enter budgets and budget items.

You may wish to set a budget for your on demand and preventive maintenance expenses and then use the Management Reports and Financial Impact reports to compare your planned and actual costs to budgeted amounts.

Use the Budgets task to define your budget, such as Preventive Maintenance 2012. You then use the Budget Items table to define individual line items and budgeted amounts for the budget. For example, for your Preventive Maintenance 2012 budget, you may want to create budget item records for each month in 2012 and define a budgeted amount for each month. Or, as another strategy, you could define one overall maintenance budget and then use the individual budget items and their associated cost category to distinguish between preventive and corrective (on demand) maintenance.

When completing the Budget Items table, note the table is used by other applications and offers several fields which are not relevant to maintenance budgets. Consider the following when completing the Budget Items table:

Note: You may notice that the Cost Categories field contains several other MAINT values. Although the standard reports use only the MAINT values described above, Archibus ships with additional MAINT values for a few reasons:

Different users will want to report on their costs by different levels of categorization. Having more categories illustrates that although currently Archibus only reports to two categories from the Operations applications, Archibus has the flexibility to report at more refined levels.

Real Estate managers typically have to budget maintenance costs at a more refined level than just Corrective Maintenance and PM. They typically sign contracts for things like snow removal, landscape maintenance, and HVAC. They need costs broken out at this level to obtain competitive bids from contractors and to negotiate leases, etc.

Real Estate managers may have clauses in their leases or property management contracts that require some other entity to cover the cost for certain types of maintenance even if the real estate manager is the one who initially pays the contractor or has in-house staff do the work.

Vendors

Working from Service Desk, you enter vendors from the Background Data process.

Working from Preventive Maintenance or Corrective Maintenance, you enter vendors using the Inventory Manager / Define Vendors task.

See Entering Vendors.

Service Contracts

Note: You do not define Service Contracts from the Preventive Maintenance Background Data process. Use the Corrective Maintenance or Service Desk applications to define these contracts.

You can enter the details of the service contracts -- the document that details the agreement between the service provider and the organization. See Define Service Contracts.

Holiday Dates

When service desk managers define service level agreements, they can specify that work for the SLA should not occur on company holidays. This affects the dates that are considered valid when scheduling work using the Labor Scheduler, and the dates the application uses to schedule work when auto-issuing work. Holidays can also affect how the service window is determined, and therefore when escalations occur for work requests.

Use the Define Holiday Dates task to define the holidays at your company. Enter the country, name of the holiday, and its calendar date. Be aware of the following:

Fiscal Year

Note: You do not define the fiscal year from Service Desk. Use Preventive Maintenance or Corrective Maintenance to define this.

The Define Fiscal Year task enables you to enter the fiscal year start date for the financial calculations used in reports.

To specify the fiscal year start:

  1. Select the Define Fiscal Year task.
  2. Enter the Fiscal Year Start Month.
  3. Enter the Fiscal Year Start Day.
  4. Click Save.

These values are saved in the Archibus Preferences table. They are used in other Archibus applications, such as Leases

Users (Employees) and Roles

In addition to establishing the above information, the business process owner needs to set up users and roles and assign them to processes. For information, see:

Maintenance-Specific Information

You develop maintenance-specific background data using the following processes:

You can develop your parts inventory using these processes: