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Space Planning & Management / Strategic Space Planning / Space Planner / Define Space Requirements
Real Property & Lease Management / Advanced Portfolio Forecasting / Advanced Portfolio Forecasting / Define Space Requirements

Concept: Space Requirement

Space requirements provide a uniform vehicle for collecting and documenting space needs and costs for different periods.

Space requirements:

• store the area and costs of your immediate needs, or your forecast needs. For example, a space requirement can store the required area for a particular forecast period as well as the cost of furnishing and moving this area
• can be added to portfolio scenarios so that you can compare different space allocation options
• are based on headcounts, room standards, or area. These are known as space standards.
  • For example, a space requirement can document space needs according to employee headcount. To do this, you must first define that each employee requires a certain number of square feet, say, 100. The system examines the current number of employees and uses this data to generate a space requirement that documents the required space and cost you require; this can be summarized at the level you specify.
  • To forecast future needs, the system uses this same information but reflects future needs. For example, if you anticipate a 10 percent growth rate for the next three quarters, you can create space requirement values that reflect a 10 percent growth rate.

You can think of space requirements like a financial budgets; for example, when companies budget money, they will typically organize expenses by organizational level (department, division, business unit), for set periods (such as quarterly) and based on types (salaries, office supplies, benefits). You can do so for the current situation as well as future forecasts. Similarly with space requirements, you collect and summarize space requirements by organizational level, for user-defined periods (quarterly, yearly) and based on types (areas, headcounts, or room standards). You can work with the current requirement or forecast future needs.

Determine How You Want to Document Space Needs

Before getting started with space requirements and space forecasts, you must analyze your business needs and goals and determine the following: 

• The method (space standard) by which you want to document your space needs. For the desired method, edit the appropriate space standards in the Room Standards table, being sure to enter cost information.
  • Headcount – Space requirements are based on the number of expected employees. The system uses the PEOPLE record of the Room Standards table, which records average area for each employee as well as cost information.
  • Area – Space needs are based on the number of square feet or meters that you provide. Information about one square foot or meter is defined in the SQM and SQFT records of the Room Standards table.
  • Room Standards -- Space needs are based on the number of each type of room (room standard), such as the CONF and WKSTA room definitions stored in the Room Standards table.

• The level at which you want to document your space needs, that is to say the area at which you will allocate your floor space. For example, if you choose business unit, you will allocate space to each business unit. If you need a finer level of detail, choose departments or functional groups.
  • Business units
  • Divisions
  • Departments
  • Functional groups

How Space Requirements are Stored

A space requirement includes the following:

• a record defining the requirement, which is stored in the Space Budgets table and has a Space Budget Type of "Space Requirement"
• a set of space requirement items generated from inventory and stored in the Space Budget Items table that represent the current state of your inventory. For example, if you generated space requirements at the departmental level using headcount, the system would create one Space Requirement Item record for each department. Each Space Requirement Item contains two important fields:
  • the Period 0 field. This stores the current inventory (the baseline inventory). In this example, the baseline inventory would store the area that each department currently occupies. The system would determine this by counting the number of employees in each department, and multiplying this by the required area for each employee.
  • the Period 1 field. Use this to document proposed changes that you want to make to the inventory due to an addition or reduction of space, a move, a reallocation of space. This value usually represents a modest change to the baseline, so typically you start from the baseline value and then adjust it.

If the space requirement is a space forecast, it includes the following:

• a record defining the forecast, which is stored in the Space Budgets table and has a Space Budget Type of "Space Forecasting"
• a set of space requirement items that reflect the changes that you want to make to the inventory. This change can be an addition or reduction of space, a move, a reallocation of space, and so on. These changes are stored in the Period 2, Period 3, etc fields and can represent the percentage of growth or reduction.

Space Requirements and Asset Requirements

Space requirements and asset requirements (developed with the Enterprise Asset Management application) share the same space requirement. The way to distinguish between a space requirement and an asset is that the space requirement records contain a value in the Room Standard (rm_std) field, and the asset records contain a value in the Equipment Standard (eq_std) field.

Creating Space Requirements

There are a few ways to create space requirement:

• in the Enterprise Asset Management's Project Proposal console, create space requirements. These requirements can be used in the Space & Portfolio Planning Console
• in the Space & Portfolio console, choose to create a portfolio scenario at the functional group level. The system will automatically generate space requirements
• with the Define Space Requirements task, define and edit space requirements

Bringing Space Requirements into Scenarios and Stack Plans

Once you develop your space requirements, you can bring them into portfolio scenarios, where you can work on them using stack plans. For example, if you have generated space requirement items at the department level for a set of floors that you want to reconfigure, you can now bring those requirements into a portfolio scenario, where each space requirement item (representing a department's need) will be a block on the stack plan. You can now drag and drop the blocks (departments) on the stack plan to find a new way to arrange the space.

Similarly, if you have made a forecast space requirement, you can bring it into a scenario and use a stack plan to map out different configurations for your forecast space. This will indicate if all of the forecast space can fit within your current buildings, or if you will need to obtain more space.

There are a few ways to bring space requirements into scenarios so that you can represent the requirements on stack plans:

• Add Space Requirements to a Scenario
• Sync Space Requirements (for scenarios at the functional group level)

Next Steps

Now that you have an understanding of space requirements from this conceptual overview, explore how to generate, edit, and work with space requirements using these topics:

• Define Space Requirements task: Overview
• Automatically Create Space Requirements
• Manually Create a Space Requirement Item
• Add Baseline Locations
• Edit Space Requirement Items
• Edit Forecast Space Requirement Items
• View Space Requirements in a Chart
• Add Space Requirements to a Scenario
• Space Requirements and Functional Groups (Concept)