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Space Planning & Management / Space Inventory & Performance / Room Inventory (Non-Transactional)
Space Planning & Management / Space Inventory & Performance / Room Inventory - Set Up & Manage (Transactional)

Define Room Categories and Room Types

Note: This topic focuses on the tasks of the Space Inventory & Performance application. However, help topics for other ARCHIBUS applications may link to this topic. If you are creating a simple room inventory for use with other processes, you can ignore the Cost per Area and Calculations Used In fields.

To track the way the major purpose of a room and to specify whether it is occupiable by personnel, you can assign the room a room category and room type.

Taking the time to clearly designate rooms according to room category and room type is an important step in developing your space inventory because the Room Category table holds the Occupiable? field. This field tags a room as housing employees and is used by many views and workflow rules, such as move procedures that find available space for a department or employee based on if a room's category is occupiable.

Generally speaking, it is a “best practice” to categorize your space in room categories to take advantage of accurate occupancy information. If you are using the Transactional Room Inventory method, all rooms must be assigned a room category.

Note: The VERT and SERV values designate rooms as housing vertical penetration areas and service areas. These values, and their assigned Room Types, may have already been added to your project by a facility manager working with the Building Performance process. See Building Performance/Vertical Penetration and Service Area Types for information.

Note: The OPEN PLAN and WORKSTATION room categories are important for situations in which you have open plans composed of individual workstations For information, see Open Plans with Workstations.

Note: Your site may wish to base its room categories and types on industry standards. For information on importing a set of room types and room categories based on industry standards, see Importing Industry-Standard Room Categories and Types

Note: Because room categories enable you to specify if an area is used in a calculation, you can distinguish between logical and physical space. For example, to negotiate housekeeping contracts or to perform energy analyses, you may need to sum the physical area. Yet to allocate space and charge departments for the use of space, you need to assign portions of the same rooms, such as workstations, desks, or lab benches. You can distinguish physical spaces, such as open plan areas, from logical spaces, such as workstations within an open area, using the Room Category you use to tag each space.

Room Categories

To edit or create a new room category, follow these steps:

1. In the Process Navigator, choose Space Inventory & Performance / Room Inventory / Define Room Categories and Types.
2. In the tree view in the left pane, click the Add New button and in the resulting pop-up dialog, choose Room Type. Or, click on an existing room category to see its values.
3. In the right pane, complete the following information:

• Room Category -- Enter a value to uniquely identify this room category.
• Description -- Enter a description of this category.
• Calculations Used In -- This field dictates whether rooms of this the room category will be used in the Update Area Totals and Perform Chargeback. For example, if you have an open plan room and rooms for the individual workstation, you do not want the calculations to consider the area of both sets. Therefore, for the OPENPLAN room category, you could set Calculations Used In to No Totals; for the individual workstation records, you could set the Calculations Used in to All Totals. For more information, see Open Plans with Workstations.
  • All Totals -- Rooms of this category will be included in all calculations.
  • Room Totals Only -- Rooms of this category will be included only in Total Room Area calculations
  • Dept, Comn, Occ -- Rooms of this category will be included in all calculations that consider department and common areas, and/or occupiable and non-occupiable areas.
  • No Totals -- Rooms of this category will not be included in any calculations.
• Cost per Area -- If you wish to associate a cost per square foot or square meter of rooms of this category, enter the value here. For example, you might have room categories of LAB and OFFICE, and these rooms have different costs to build and maintain. Enter these costs in this field, and the chargeback routine can assess the cost of rooms of this category so that the cost can be internally billed to the department that uses the room.
• Occupiable? -- Select Yes or No to indicate whether rooms of this room category can be occupied by personnel.
• Super-Category-- Indicates to the system that areas of these categories are usable areas, vertical penetrations, or service areas. In the Space Console, managers can highlight a drawing by super-category for an overview of how the floor is divided into Vertical Penetration, Service, and Usable Area without the details of the categories and types within these super-categories. Choose from the available values:
  • Vertical Penetration -- If the room category will be assigned to areas representing vertical penetration, choose this value from the drop-down list. You will want to set Occupiable? to No.
  • Service Area -- If the room category will be assigned to areas representing service areas, choose this value from the drop-down list. Depending on operations at your site, a service area can be either occupiable or non-occupiable.
  • Usable Area -- If the category does not represent vertical penetration area or service area, you will want to complete this field with Usable Area. Set Occupiable? to Yes.
  • Other-- used by sites using IFMA or BOMA standards. See IFMA and BOMA Standards for information.
• Highlight Pattern - ACAD -- Complete with the pattern by which you want to highlight rooms assigned to this category in CAD drawings. For example, you can run the "Highlight Rooms by Category and Type" query to have the system highlight rooms according to the category or type to which they belong. This field determines the pattern by which rooms assigned to this category are highlighted.
• Click on the ellipses button to access the Set Highlight Pattern dialog for defining the pattern. For information, see Defining Highlight Patterns.
• You can also define highlight patterns by running the Set Room Category and Room Type Highlight Patterns task, which offers tools for defining multiple highlights at once.
2. Click Save in the upper right corner.
   

Room Types

Room types further classify room categories. For example, a Lab room category can further be classified into Dry Lab, Wet Lab, or Animal Lab room types. To create or edit a room type:

1. In the Process Navigator, choose Space Inventory & Performance / Room Inventory / Define Room Categories and Types.
2. In the tree view in the left pane, select the a room category.
3. Click the Add New button and in the resulting pop-up dialog, choose Room Type. Or, click on an existing room type to examine and edits its values.
4. In the right pane, complete the following information:
• Room Category -- The system displays the value of the selected Room Category.
• Room Type -- Enter a unique value to represent the service area room type.
• Description -- Enter a descriptive name for the room type.
• Highlight Pattern -- Complete with the value representing the pattern by which you want to highlight rooms assigned to this type in CAD drawings. See the above explanation under Room Categories for information.
5. Click Save in the upper right corner.

Tip: Once you define room categories and types and assign them to rooms, you may want to ensure that rooms of a certain room type have a capacity of one occupant. See

Setting Employee Capacity for Rooms in Bulk