ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO INTEGRATING YOUR FACILITY DATA

Transcription

1 ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO INTEGRATING YOUR FACILITY DATA

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 3 CAD Floor Plan Layouts 4 Seating Charts 6 Personnel Move Management 9 Department Space Allocations 11 Key Metrics 15 About Us 16 2

3 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Corporate facility departments are all familiar with the challenge of maintaining accurate data. This data can be spread, and often duplicated, across multiple systems including CAD floor plans, Excel reports, HR systems and more. Keeping these moving parts in sync is essential to maintaining an accurate facility management and reporting tool. In addition, a good system will allow you to report back to senior management in minutes, rather than days, bringing a tremendous amount of value to your department. In this ebook, we will outline steps to integrate your various data points into one central facility management system. The term IWMS (Integrated Workplace Management System) has become the most prevalent acronym for facility management systems. IWMS systems typically include a combination of modules which might include space management, personnel move management, maintenance, lease administration, sustainability, capital planning and more. For the purposes of this ebook, we will specifically focus on integrating the Space & Personnel aspects of IWMS including: CAD Floor Plan Layouts Seating Charts Personnel Move Management Department Space Allocations Space & Personnel Reporting In future ebooks and white papers we will address other aspects of IWMS including Work Orders, Preventative Maintenance, Lease Administration, Project Management and more. 3

4 CAD FLOOR PLAN LAYOUTS CAD FLOOR PLAN LAYOUTS We have seen many companies struggle to generate a complete, accurate set of CAD floor plans for all of their properties. This section will provide some key tips for developing CAD floor plans and maintaining them on an ongoing basis. If you do not have an accurate set of CAD floor plans for your facility (or facilities), you will need to perform some field survey work. You will then need to input your survey notes into CAD. For basic day-today space planning, we have found that AutoCAD, AutoCAD light or any DWG compatible system will work just fine. You may have also heard about BIM (Building Information Modeling) software. In our experience, BIM is not required for the majority of your space planning requirements. It can also be very expensive and time consuming to implement. If your internal team does not have the time or resources to complete the survey/input work, there are many support options available. The first place to look is your architect or furniture dealer, who will often have accurate CAD files from project work, or will have the resources to perform the survey/input work. If you re a good customer, you may even be able to convince them to do the work for free! In addition, our team here at ProLease is available to perform onsite field surveys anywhere in the world, and we can also help with PDF to CAD conversions. When developing a set of CAD floor plans for basic facility management, the key plan elements you will want to include are building core, shell, interior partitions and furniture. These elements make up what is often referred to as a furniture plan. 4

5 CAD FLOOR PLAN LAYOUTS Once you have an accurate set of CAD plans, it is critical to determine how they will be maintained going forward. The key to this step is designating one person or group of people as your gatekeeper(s) for updating the plans, and making sure to hold them responsible. This can be an in-house staff member with CAD experience, your architect or furniture dealer. You can also outsource this responsibility to our ProLease CAD team. We maintain CAD floor plan updates for millions of square feet among multiple customers. The benefit of outsourcing the updates to your architect, furniture dealer or ProLease is that we are always there to provide timely support so your facilities staff can focus on other important responsibilities. One small but important detail to mention is Space Numbering, also known as Room Numbering. It is very important that you assign a Space Number to all offices, workstations, conference rooms and other areas on your floor plans. Our ProLease CAD team is pleased to offer guidance on how to develop a consistent standardized method for Space Numbering. Accurate CAD floor plans with Space Numbers are the foundation for your integrated facility management system, a.k.a IWMS. 5

6 SEATING CHARTS SEATING CHARTS A Seating Chart consists of a basic floor plan layout with personnel names shown in offices, workstations, etc. To generate seating charts, many companies simply place personnel names as text on their CAD floor plans, or even PDFs. Upon request, the office manager or facilities team member will then distribute the seating charts in paper or PDF format. While this method sounds easy, it is completely outdated, very tedious, does not generate reports and does not provide any visibility to the work performed by your department. Whether you have 50,000 square feet or 5 million square feet, you should be looking at an IWMS system to automate this process and add intelligence to your floor plans. When selecting IWMS software, it is critical to make sure that the system allows non-technical CAD users to easily access seating charts on their own. The basic notion of being able to access an accurate floor plan with personnel names can be very exciting for lots of people across multiple departments including HR, real estate, IT, mailroom, security, and, of course, facilities. 6

7 SEATING CHARTS Once you select a system, you will need to determine how to connect personal data to your accurate CAD floor plans. There are two primary options: 1. INTEGRATION You can integrate your IWMS system with your company s HR system. This involves some support required from your IT department, but there are many benefits including: A. If personnel data changes, such as last name or department, it does not need to be updated in two places. Updates in the HR system will flow right into your IWMS system. B. With new hires, data can flow right from the HR system into your IWMS. You will not have to manually enter new employee data; you simply assign them to a location on the floor plans. 2. NO INTEGRATION This process starts by importing an Excel file with personnel data and locations into the IWMS system. Then you can update all personnel data directly in the IWMS system. This process is quicker and easier than integrating with your HR system, but it involves duplicate data entry and increases the chance for errors. 7

8 SEATING CHARTS Check out the sample seating chart below from our ProLease Workplace software: Once you have accurate seating charts in an easy-to-use IWMS system (like ProLease!), you then need to determine how to maintain them on an ongoing basis. Just like your floor plans, it is very important to designate an individual or team as responsible for updating personnel locations. This is a perfect segue into our next section, Personnel Move Management. 8

9 PERSONNEL MOVE MANAGEMENT PERSONNEL MOVE MANAGEMENT Now that you have accurate CAD floor plans and personnel data, you need to stay updated with ongoing personnel moves. It is absolutely critical to make sure that whoever maintains your IWMS system is in the loop and involved with the personnel move process. If people move freely without any kind of restrictions, it will be impossible to keep your IWMS system up to date. The first step to staying in the loop is integrating your IWMS system with your company s HR system. Personnel and department data can then flow right into your IWMS system without any chance of missing or inaccurate data. The HR system can also automatically notify you about New Hires and Separations, which are a key part of maintaining your personnel locations. With New Hire start date notifications, you should have plenty of lead time to plan space for the new employee(s). With Separations, the HR system can update your IWMS system so that people automatically drop off floor plans on a specified separation date, without you having to remember to update the system. The second step of staying in the loop with personnel moves is to implement a workflow process in your IWMS system. A good IWMS system should provide workflow capabilities to support the move request process. A basic workflow example is as follows: 1. Any employee with the correct access level can submit a move request through an online form. The form should allow them to submit the request in basic text form, or specify the exact personnel and space numbers for the move. 2. Once the request is submitted, an is automatically sent to the facilities department or move coordinator. The move coordinator can then approve or reject the move. 3. Once approved, the move coordinator can then set up one or multiple move scenarios in the IWMS system. 4. When the employee and move coordinator agree on a move scenario, it can then be scheduled in the IWMS system for a specific date and the floor plans will update automatically on that date. 9

10 PERSONNEL MOVE MANAGEMENT Check out a screen shot below from our Personnel Move Form in ProLease Workplace: If your company can set up rules so that all moves have to follow a process similar to the one pictured above, then your seating charts should remain 100% accurate at all times! (Well, maybe 99%) 10

11 DEPARTMENT SPACE ALLOCATIONS DEPARTMENT SPACE ALLOCATIONS Space allocations (a.k.a. space chargebacks) are employed by corporations as an internal accounting function to hold departments responsible for the space they occupy. Over the past 20 years in the business, we have seen two primary allocation methods: Headcount method: Real estate costs are allocated to departments based on their headcount. Space method: Real estate costs are allocated to departments based on their proportionate share of square footage. From our experience, the Space method is much more equitable than the Headcount method. For example: Department A has 20 people and occupies 2,000 square feet at a property. Department B has 20 people and occupies 3,000 square feet at the same property. With the Headcount method, these two departments would receive the same internal allocation charge even though department B is using 50% more space. With the Space method, department B would be held accountable and receive a higher allocation charge because it occupies more space. The end result of implementing the Space method versus the Headcount method is that departments become more aware of the space they occupy. This recognition typically leads to better space utilization, which can result in a reduction of real estate costs. And, the real estate savings are typically far greater than the cost of implementing an IWMS system. 11

12 DEPARTMENT SPACE ALLOCATIONS The other great news is that implementing the Space allocation method can be nearly automatic if you maintain your CAD floor plans and personnel moves as indicated in previous sections above. There is however a small amount of work required to setup space allocations, which we have detailed below. The first step to setup space allocations is to designate an allocation type for each space on your floor plans. A good IWMS system will give you the four allocation options shown below: 1. PERSONNEL This method allows you to allocate space to a department based on who is occupying the space. For example, if Mary is in the Finance department and she is sitting in Space #201, the square footage of Space #201 is automatically assigned to the Finance department. The majority of our clients use this method for all of their office and workstation spaces because it is automatically maintained, as long as you keep up-to-date with personnel locations on the plans. 2. DIRECT SPACE This method allows you to assign one or multiple departments to a specific space, regardless of who is utilizing the space. For example, you have a flexible space that is assigned to the Facilities department. Many people from multiple departments move in and out of the space in a short period of time. In this case, the room can stay assigned to the Facilities department even though multiple departments have been using the space. This allocation type is often used for conference rooms and flex spaces. 3. FLOOR SHARED Assigning a space as Floor Shared allows you to allocate the square footage of that space to all the departments on a floor. This is often used for copy rooms, pantries and sometimes conference rooms. 4. BUILDING SHARED This is the same concept as Floor Shared except the square footage is allocated to departments on all of the floors you occupy in a building. This might be used for something like a training room that is shared by all departments in a building. 12

13 DEPARTMENT SPACE ALLOCATIONS The IWMS system should make it easy to assign one of the allocation types above to each space, without having to enter them one by one. For example, it should allow you to quickly highlight all of the offices and workstations and set them to the Personnel Method and then highlight all of the conference rooms and assign them as Floor Shared. After assigning the allocation type to each space, there is one other additional setup item. You need to determine the total Rentable Square Footage (RSF) that will be allocated for each property. If the property is leased, most companies will manually enter a total RSF from the lease. If the property is owned, most companies will also manually plug in a total RSF for the property. The only other option is to use the BOMA method to calculate total RSF for the building and for each floor. The BOMA method will give you a true RSF, but it only makes sense if you occupy an entire building and you have accurate CAD plans for each floor including the basement and sub-basement. We address this in further detail in a separate white paper. For the purposes of department space allocations, we feel that the BOMA method is overkill. After setting the total RSF to be allocated and identifying the allocation type on your plans, you should now be able to generate department allocation reports and floor plans with a click of a button. 13

14 DEPARTMENT SPACE ALLOCATIONS Check out a sample floor plan and allocation report below from ProLease: This is an example of the typical output required for department space allocations. Each company is different, so your IWMS system should be able to generate plans and reports in varying formats. 14

15 KEY METRICS KEY METRICS Now that you have all of your space and personnel data implemented in an IWMS system, you should be able to generate some awesome reports! These reports can serve as an essential tool for understanding your company s space utilization and as a foundation for making critical real estate decisions. Here are a couple of simple reports from ProLease Workplace that include Key Metrics: The great thing about setting up your floor plans and personnel data in an IWMS system is that metrics reports like those above can be generated with a simple click. 15

16 ABOUT US ABOUT US ProLease is a leading provider of IWMS software and services. Our ProLease Real Estate & Facilities software comprises five integrated modules that are extremely powerful yet very easy to use. These best-in-class solutions work together seamlessly or may be implemented separately. Our modules include Real Estate Equipment, Project Management, Workplace and Maintenance. There are more than 700 companies using ProLease today including ACE, Alcoa, Diageo and PricewaterhouseCoopers. We have been in business since 1992 and ProLease has been on the market since We have no outside debt or capital investment, and all key executives have been in place since the launch of ProLease in These factors have enabled us to provide high level solutions to our ProLease customers for 20 years and many more to come. Contact us today to schedule a prolease demonstration proleasesoftware.com 16