Outsourcing Facility Data and Drawing Development

Some sites prefer to outsource developing their floor plans and other basic facility data, such as employee lists, department lists, and standards. This is a good strategy if:

• you don't have the resources to enter such information as your site's divisions, departments, standards, and employees.
• you don’t have staff that know or wish to learn the basics of AutoCAD or Revit to create room boundaries.
• you don’t have floor plan drawings and don’t have the CAD or BIM staff to create them.

Because you can manage all changes in personnel assignment, department assignment, and room attributes from the Archibus Space Console, you only need to update your drawings and data when you are getting started with Archibus or after a renovation. For this reason, many organizations find it most cost-effective to outsource data and drawing development, as it is only an occasional task.

Outsourcing Options

You have a number of options for outsourcing drawing development.

• Consult your architectural or interiors firm. If you are working with an architectural or interior firm for your construction or renovation needs, they will have CAD- and BIM-trained personnel on staff and they will already be familiar with your facility and its drawing files.
• Consult your Archibus business partner. Most Archibus business partners provide drawing and data development services. If you have a large project, they can connect you with a reputable offshore provider and can ensure that the results meet the requirements for accuracy and consistency.
• Consult Archibus Professional Services at professionalservices@archibus.com. Archibus provides drawing and development services both from its US-based and overseas offices.

Data Development

Your consultant can work with you to determine the facility data you already possess and how to best import it into Archibus. For example, you can provide the Archibus business partner or other consultant with Excel spreadsheets of your employees, divisions, departments, tradespeople, and so on, and the consultant can import this data into the Archibus database. Or, your consultant can use Archibus Connectors to import your data from multiple enterprise systems into Archibus.

You may find that you need to develop this data from scratch; in this case, the consultant can work with you to assess your practices and determine the data that must be developed.

As another approach, your site might choose to develop the key facility data using Archibus forms, but outsource the drawing work, as discussed below.

Drawing-development Standards

When discussing drawing development for Archibus Foundations, refer to the topics listed on the Archibus Foundations: Developing Facility Data Overview so that the data developers understand the level of detail needed. Be clear that you need a drawing appropriate for facility management or lifecycle management. You do not need a drawing accurate enough for construction.

Should you ever renovate a portion of a building, at that point, you will commission a survey on that portion of the building, but there is no solid ROI on money invested in more accurate drawings on spec if they do not already exist. This guideline applies to other kinds of information as well. Your provider may offer to collect other information, such as paint finishes, in the same survey. However, unless you have a business function that uses that information, it is best not to collect it right away.

If you or your provider would like more information on what BIM information may or may not prove useful and in what scenario, refer to the Archibus Help topics on BIM Execution Plans. These topics are located in the CAD / BIM User's Guide / Smart Client Extension for Revit section of the Table of Contents in Archibus Help.

Required Drawing Elements

For space planning, in terms of drawn elements you need only:

• Interior gross area boundary (one per floor)
• Room boundaries (one per room)
• Room numbers (numbered for wayfinding)

Desired but not required elements are:

• Cross marks (X's) through vertical chases are desired to more clearly illustrate what spaces should be labeled as vertical penetrations.
• Stairway lines are desired to more clearly show space spaces are emergency exits.
• For Revit rooms, doors to show the approximate locations of entrances and exits are useful.
• For AutoCAD drawings, if doors or door openings are not already present in your CAD plan, there is usually not a good ROI on developing them from scratch. You need only the polyline boundaries as described in the Start from a Scanned Drawing video.

Standards for Drawing Accuracy

Should your provider need to draw new room boundaries or place doors, a +/- 6"or +/-10cm accuracy will do for most facilities. That is, your provider can draw to a snap grid that is 6"x6" or 10cmx10cm and produce a plan detailed enough for space management and planning.

The only exception would be results that are audited. This is the case for spaces that are to be used for indirect-cost recovery. Hospitals that charge space back to insurance carriers or universities that charge space back to government grants find themselves in this situation. In this case, consult the administrator of your chargeback program as to the desired level of accuracy. Typically this is within 1 inch or 2.5 cm.

Do note that organizations that charge back space to leases do not need this higher level of accuracy, as the chargeback is based on the negotiated area of the lease, which does not match the actual areas derived from CAD or BIM.

Drawing-development Approaches

Your outsource provider can take a number of approaches for efficiently creating lifecycle management drawings.

• From BIM models. If you have Revit BIM models, your provider can follow the instructions in Connect your CAD Floor Plans and BIM Models to Archibus. This is the most economical option, as the model will already have all of the interior gross, room area, and room number information. Your provider must just remove extra details, verify the room numbers, and catalog the interior gross and room boundaries using the Archibus commands. They can catalog all rooms within a model in a single command.
• From CAD plans. If you have CAD plans, your provider can follow the instructions in Connect your CAD Floor Plans and BIM Models to Archibus. Again, the 6-inch or 10-cm accuracy standard is sufficient.
• From a mixture of CAD plans and BIM models. If you have a mixture of CAD and BIM electronic documents, you can use them as is. There is no need to create BIM models for CAD plans or vice versa. Your provider can mix the two on a floor-by-floor basis.
• From scanned drawings.You may not have any kind of CAD plans, but you may have a scanned bitmap of your floor plans or a paper version of the floor plan that you can scan. In this case, your provider can insert that scanned drawing into AutoCAD or Revit and quickly draw the space management plan over that using the instructions mentioned in the topics above. If you have a choice of drawing package, choose Revit: Revit can snap to the geometry implied by the scanned image. Revit also can more quickly draw walls and doors than can AutoCAD, and Revit automatically creates enclosed rooms. For instructions, see Connect your CAD Floor Plans and BIM Models to Archibus.
• Using a laser survey . If you are using a local provider, they may suggest instead that they do a laser survey. For these surveys, the provider uses a laser measuring device attached to a laptop computer to quickly identify and draw the boundaries of the room. If you are performing space chargeback per the notes above, this is an option worth pricing and comparing. Otherwise, using existing information will likely have the fastest ROI.

Making Changes to your Project Drawings

There are several ways for working with your provider so that they can produce the drawings you need.

Archibus Cloud

If you have Archibus Cloud, you edit drawings locally and publish the SVG enterprise graphics to the cloud.

Using your hosted server

Often, your hosting provider is your Archibus business partner, and they can develop your drawings for a fee. If you have a separate firm doing your CAD or BIM work, you can instruct your hosting provider to grant access to the CAD/BIM Specialist.

Either party can access the drawings on the server in a number of ways:

Using a remote connection

If your IT configuration allows your provider to connect directly to your Archibus project, your provider can make the changes they need, even if they are off site or in another country.

• VPN. Your IT configuration may allow providers to access portions of the network via a virtual-private network configuration. You can consult the Archibus System Management help topic "Single-Server Deployment for a Small Workgroup: Smart Client-Only Installation" for details. In this scenario, your provider needs access to:
  • the Archibus URL (e.g. http:\\myarchibuserver:8080\archibus).
  • the file share where your Archibus projects are located (e.g. \\myarchibuserver\AIPROJECTS)
• Cloud. You might run Archibus from a cloud server, such as a server hosted on Amazon Web Services. In this case, your provider and your own staff can access Archibus the same way.
  • To access your Archibus project, your provider just needs a Web browser and the Smart-Client Only installation of Archibus that came with your distribution.
  • In this configuration, your provider does not need their own license of Archibus. Since they are signing into your Archibus server, they use one of the licenses assigned from your team.

Transferring an entire project

If your provider is off site and cannot connect to your Archibus project, you can transfer your project to them. To do so:

1. Invoke the Smart Client and use the Stop Servers button to stop the Jetty and Sybase servers. (Stopping Sybase allows file-system access to the database file, which would otherwise be locked.)
2. Use WinZip to create a .zip file of your project subfolders, the same way that you would when making a backup of your project. For instance, if you are backing up the "hq" project, you would zip up this folder and all its subfolders: c:\users\Public\archibus\projects\hq.
3. Send the .zip file to your provider.
4. When you receive the updated files from your provider, have them follow the same .zip file process. You can then unzip the new files into your project folder to use their changes. Keep your older .zip file as a backup of the previous state of your data.

Transferring only space management files

You may wish to keep working with your Archibus deployment while your provider is updating drawings. Yet your provider may not be able to sign into the network.

In this case:

1. Zip up just the set of drawings that your provider is working on from the drawings folder (e.g. from the c:\users\Public\archibus\projects\hq\drawings folder).
2. Create an extract file of a copy of your space data. Sign into Web Central as ADMIN or AIADMIN, load the System Administration / Archibus System Administration / Add-In Manager / Run Basic Rule Wizard. Choose "Select an existing rule to modify". Choose the BasicRules_TransferOut rule. Press "Next". then press "Test" to run the rule.
3. Zip up the extracted files. The files appear in a folder named after your username; for instance if you are user "AFM", these will be in the c:\users\public\archibus\projects\users\afm\dt folder.
4. Send the drawing and data zip files to your provider. They will have any current room information as well as all the validating data they need to work on your space data.
5. Instruct your provider to send back data in the same form, but to only include data for the drawings they change. In this way, the files they send back will not overwrite any data that you have edited in other buildings or on other floors.

To import their changes:

1. Expand the drawings they send back to your drawings folder (e.g. c:\users\Public\archibus\projects\hq\drawings)
2. Expand the enterprise graphics they send back to your enterprise graphics folder (e.g. c:\users\Public\archibus\projects\hq\drawings)
3. Expand the data files they send back to your data files folder (e.g. c:\users\Public\archibus\projects\users\afm\dt\)
4. Import the extract files into your database. Sign into Web Central as ADMIN or AIADMIN, load the System Administration / Archibus System Administration / Add-In Manager / Run Basic Rule Wizard. Choose "Select an existing rule to modify". Choose the BasicRules_TransferIn rule. Press "Next" and then "Test" to run the rule.