Environmental & Risk Management / Clean Building

Using Service Requests with your Hazmat Assessment Items and Projects

If your site is licensed for the On Demand application, you can take advantage of the ARCHIBUS Service Desk features to enforce a workflow for your hazmat issues based on service level agreements (SLAs). For example, you may want to use an SLA-based workflow to define important aspects of the hazmat workflow such as:

the service provider (abatement company, internal staff, and inspector)that will handle the task
the service window for completing and responding to the task
procedures for escalating incomplete work
procedures for approving estimated costs
procedures for notifying various staff on the status of the request

Since hazmat issues present potentially dangerous situations, are highly regulated, involve several steps to resolve, and are subject to fines and legal action for non-compliance, it is important that hazmat issues be properly addressed in a timely manner. Your site may find it well worth the time to establish a formal workflow process that is enforced by SLAs. Such a process will ensure that incomplete work is escalated for review and hazmat issues are managed as efficiently as possible.

You use these tasks to create and work with hazmat service requests:

Manage Project Activity Items
Manage Hazard Assessment Items
Operational Reports/Hazard Activity Summary report

Users licensed for the On Demand application, will have the Service Request tabs enabled for the Manage Activity Items and Manage Hazard Assessment Items tasks. The user or the user’s role must have the Service Desk/Client process assigned

This tab is not enabled for users who are not licensed for the On Demand application.

The Clean Building application offers two ways to work with service requests:

create service requests for the project as a whole
create service requests for individual assessment items

Whether a service request is associated with the project or pertains to an assessment item, it will appear in the Manage Project Activity Items task and the Hazard Activity Summary report. In these tasks' filter, use the Category option to show service requests associated with a project, service requests associated with assessment items, or all service requests.

Note: Clean Building reports are based on assessment items. The details that you track with service requests appear only in one Clean Building report: the Operational Reports/Hazard Activity Summary report.

Prerequisite: Establishing the SLAs

In order for a service request to be properly routed to all involved parties in a hazmat issue, a Service Desk Manager must first establish the SLAs that govern hazmat-related service requests. Any hazmat-related SLA must have SERVICE DESK-MAINTENANCE as its request type. Hazmat service requests are considered to be On Demand service requests.

To define the SLA, the Service Desk Manager and the Environmental Hazard Manager should collaborate and discuss the required workflow and steps for various hazmat issues that might arise. For information on creating an SLA, see Procedure to Create a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Setting Up On Demand Work Parameters.

Using the Service Request Features

You will use these tasks to create and work with hazmat service requests:

Manage Project Activity Items
Manage Hazard Assessment Items
Operational Reports/Hazard Activity Summary report

The following fields and features deserve mention:

Cost Fields

Costs for assessment items and service requests are tracked separately. If you choose to track your costs with service requests , you can use the Operational Reports/Hazard Activity Summary report to see your cost information.

You will also be able to see your cost data using the On Demand application's cost reports.

The Description Field

The system automatically completes the Description of the service request field with a description of the hazardous substance that is associated with the hazmat project. You can add your own notes to this field.

Generating Survey Items (Assessment Items)

Note that when you are working with service requests, you can use the Generate Survey Items button to generate a set of survey records for the criteria you specify. Records created with the feature can be considered to be survey items (although they are really stored as assessment items in the system).

This feature is designed for situations in which you do not initially know what areas will indeed require assessment items; therefore, you initially create survey items so that you can survey your facility and assess needs. For areas that need detailed tracking and attention, you can then copy the survey items to new assessment items.

For example, suppose you have a service request for performing a field survey on an area for which you've never assessed hazmat issues. From the Manage Activity Items task, you can use the Generate Survey Items button to generate a set of new records for surveying the area. Once you know which rooms have issues, you can use each service request's Copy button to copy a survey item to an official assessment items that must be managed and addressed.

The idea behind this approach is that it may not be possible to know beforehand what actual assessment items will ultimately be needed. Therefore, conceptually you generate survey items (e.g. a survey items for a room). For items that need tracking, you then copy these survey items to assessment items, which may result in multiple assessment items for the room. You can then manage the individual assessment items with the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task.

Note that this feature is completely optional and provided for your convenience only. You can always create assessment items for initial surveys using the Manage Hazard Assessment Items task. See Creating Hazard Assessment Item Records.