Space Management & Planning / Space Inventory & Performance

Developing a Space Inventory that has Both Rooms and Groups

As the Navigator indicates, there two levels at which you can track your space inventory: with a group inventory, or with a room inventory.

However, many sites find that their conditions dictate an inventory that combines both rooms and groups. For example, for certain floors it may important to identify each room with a room polyline and record; yet for other floors, simply outlining a department's area with a group polyline will suffice. Even within a floor, you may find that your needs are best served with a combination of groups and rooms. For example, a floor might contain two or three expensive labs that you'd like to carefully track with rooms, but the remainder of the floor can be tracked with group polylines. As another example, if you'd like to create a personnel inventory, you need to document employee offices as rooms ; but if you have other area on the floor that are used by departments, you can outline these areas with groups.

The Space Inventory & Performance application and the Space Chargeback application support developing an inventory that combines both rooms and groups. The Update Area Totals and the Perform Chargeback tasks consider both rooms and groups. The inventory and chargeback reports that document departmental area and cost include both the rooms and the groups assigned to a department within one report. Similarly, reports such as Remaining Area and the Prorate report include both rooms and groups.

If you want an inventory that mixes rooms and groups, there are a few issues you need to be aware of:

• When you draw your rooms and groups, be careful that they do not overlap, as this will double-count your space.
• At the maximum level set by a prorate area (the rm.prorate, gp.prorate, or fl.prorate_remain fields) rooms and groups cannot co-exist, UNLESS the rooms are service common areas. For example, if you want rooms and groups to coexist on the same floor, then you cannot charge back any common areas. If you want rooms and groups to coexist in the same building, but on different floors, then your common areas must be prorated to floor only.

Note: If you developed a composite space inventory with pre-v18.1, and find that your rooms and groups overlap, you have two options: You can:

Delete the group asset symbols . That way, there will be only rooms that exist, and total area and chargeback calculations will be run correctly.

Exclude groups in all calculations. If you want to keep groups for graphical reference, you can do so, but you must specify that groups are not to be used in calculations. To do so, set the IncludeGroupsInUnifiedSpaceCalcs field of the Archibus Application Parameters table to 0. The default value (1) specifies that groups to be used in space calculations.