Space Planning & Management / Space Inventory & Performance / Group Inventory

Group Inventory (Process Overview)

A group typically represents an area on a floor that is used by a single department and is covered by the same lease. Groups can be general open areas, or a set (or "group") of contiguous offices, such as a group of offices used by the Marketing department.

Groups are a convenient means of outlining departmental boundaries on a floor and determining total departmental area within a facility. Rather than taking the time to capture each room on a floor plan drawing, and then assigning the room to a department, many sites use a group inventory to quickly capture departmental areas and obtain an understanding how space is used by the departments of the organization.

Minimally, you develop groups to outline departmental boundaries so that you can calculate total departmental areas. Once departmental areas are outlined, common areas not belonging to any specific department can be outlined with group polylines. These common areas can then be proportionately assessed to the departments on the floor, within the building, or within the site by running a chargeback routine.

You can further define groups by developing the following information:

• If you use numbers to identify groups, such as FINA (finance area A), or ACCT2 (accounting section 2), you can assign such numbers to the group areas you create.
• If you use standards, such as DEPT_AREA, OFFICE_SUITE, LOUNGE, or FILE_AREA, to categorize groups, you can enter these in the Group Standards table and assign them to groups.
• After CAD specialists outline the departmental areas on a floor plan drawing, they can use group asset symbols to outline any common areas on the floor. If you want to charge departments for their use of these shared group areas, you can designate these groups as for use with the chargeback routine.

Note: Once you develop your group inventory, you can charge departments for the space that they use. See Chargeback Overview.

Note: If you require a more refined space inventory than offered by a group inventory, you can outline particular rooms, associate these with departments, and bill departments for the rooms that they occupy. See Room Inventory.

Note: Building owners tracking rentable areas can use groups to represent a floor's office suites.

Note: Whether or not you are using the workspace transaction-based space features, or the non-transactional space features does not affect the procedure that you follow to create a group inventory. The only difference is that the Update Area Totals task will run a transaction-based set of calculations if you have enabled workspace transactions.

Procedure

The basic procedure is:

1. Pre-requisite: A business process owner defines the space hierarchy and organization hierarchy using the Define Locations task and the Define Organizations task.
2. Pre-requisite: A facilities or space manager gets started with a space inventory by developing each floor's gross areas, service areas, and vertical penetration areas, which generates building performance data.
3. A space manager or facility manager defines the types of groups (group standards) used in your facility.

Note: This step is optional. Group standards provide further classification of your groups, but are not essential for a group inventory.

4. A CAD Specialist uses the Archibus Smart Client Extension for AutoCAD to outline departmental area and common areas on a floor plan drawing and convert them to asset symbols. See Draw Group Areas.
5. A CAD specialist saves the floor plan drawing as an enterprise graphic.
6. A space manager or facility manager reviews the group records generated from the drawing and edits groups as necessary.
7. A space manager or facility manager runs the Update Area Totals action which totals departmental areas and generates other statistics.
8. A facility manager or space manager reviews the group inventory reports.
9. A space manager examines other analyses.

See Also

Including Both Groups and Rooms in a Space Inventory

Group Area (Concept)

Common Area (Concept)