This week we are thrilled to announce a new series on the blog: Conversations with Bob. Conversations with Bob are a series of videos where Bob Stephen, CEO & Managing Director of Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC. discusses different aspects of the industry. Be sure to keep your eyes open for more Conversations with Bob!
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Thoughts? Questions? Comment below and let us know what you think! We'd love to hear your insights.
SpaceView is a web based employee locator nestled within the firewall of a corporation. It's concept is simple - to keep the information about employees simple & accessible. Completely automated SpaceView requires minimal maintenance. Automated AutoLisp routines create the Drawing Web Format (DWF) files each night. The employee data information is retrieved through a lie query to the CAFM database. This simple yet effective web-based tool provides such information as vacancies, upcoming moves, furniture layout, organization ownership, telecommunication assets, and conference room and lab location.
With the addition of the redlining capabilities, planners can communicate moves, adds, and changes through the web. Other components include an online work order system with email notification and web-based move requests.
This week we're sharing a brief SpaceView Geography training video, brought to you by our CEO & Managing Director Bob Stephen.
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Thoughts? Questions? Comment below and let us know what you think! We'd love to hear your insights.
Guys, we have some awesome news! We are beyond thrilled to announce the official opening of Robert Stephen Consulting LLC's Salt Lake City, UT location. Thanks to some great support from our home office location in San Ramon, CA we were able to broaden our horizons with this new office space.
This expansion is an amazing addition to our location in the East Bay. We are so excited to finally have an office in beautiful downtown Salt Lake City. Who wouldn't enjoy doing their day to day tasks and meeting clients or potential clients with a that gorgeous view of the Wasatch Mountains? Downtown Salt Lake City has so much to offer on top of the beautiful location.
If you or your company are located in Utah or the greater Salt Lake area and are interested in learning more about Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) Software like ARCHIBUS, or are interested in bringing our ARCHIBUS User Group Training to you don't hesitate to reach out to us at info@rsc2lc.com! We'd love to hear from you.
Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC maintains AutoCAD tools that help manage drawings for
our staff and clients. We’ve recently updated the RSC AutoCAD
interface. Here are some of the new features:
Simplified AutoLoader installation (for ACAD
2013 and above).The RSC commands are available on
the ribbon, as
toolbars, and as drop down menus for access in classic view.
All the Hatch and Query Text commands function
against the HQ database.
Glorious new icons.
All ARCHIBUS Smart Client ribbon
functionality has been migrated into the Classic View
To showcase a single tool, you can view an example of the List
Layers function in action.
This tool helps with drawing clean up by
providing a list of layers inside the drawing. This list can then
be edited with any AutoCAD tools. You can merge layers (LAYMRG) in
this list with the standard layers or delete (LAYDEL) them entirely.
Disclaimer
These tools have been collected and developed to improve the
workflow at RSC and to provide a starting point for adding client specific
customizations. They range from ho-hum to awesome. Some of them
work flawlessly, and just how you expect. We are constantly striving to improve the ways we help clients.
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Thoughts? Questions? Comment below and let us know what you think! We'd love to hear your insights.
This is not the first time we've shared an article on reporting. So why do we keep doing it? Because quality reporting may be most important things a Facilities Department can do! The facilities management industry is rapidly prioritizes data collection, management, and storage we must provide better reporting. High quality, efficient reporting is vital for your company to grow and IWMS plays an integral role in reporting success. IWMS helps promote data accuracy, increase productivity, reduces cost, and effortlessly sharing information throughout your company. This means you can more accurately and precisely see what changes need to be made and more strategically plan for the future -- making a direct impact on your bottom line. So here are a few tips we have for better reporting:
Reporting Goals
DETERMINE WHAT TO TRACK
The first step in successful reporting, is to determine what to track. Make a list of resources to manage and relationships between those resources. For example:
What resources are you managing?
Costs
People
Space
Time
What does your boss need to know?
Cost per Area
Headcount changes over Time
Occupancy vs. Capacity
What is the story you are trying to tell?
What point are you trying to make?
Once you have this information, you can create an idealized report. An effective idealized report will direct strategic decisions that affect the bottom line.
Considerations
There is no standard list of what to track. The information that matters most will vary
from one company to another.
Tracking furniture won't make sense for a publicly
traded corporation who considers the furniture depreciated the moment it is
purchased. OR
Tracking
furniture does make sense for a company that is owned by a single private owner
because of how taxes are assessed.
Perhaps tracking employee locations through audits is useful as it will indicate
how much capacity is available and how much is needed. OR
Your company track moves. Tracking moves allows you to track churn rate (the percentage of people who have moved over the course of the year) which indicates expansion and contractions.
IWMS & Excel
Excel is a great tool for developing an idealized report. It is easy to work with. It is fluid. You can mock something up that gets the point across quickly. Often it is used as the main reporting tool before moving to IWMS.
So, once this data is availalbe we often get the question: "Can I export this to Excel?"
This question has significantly more depth than may appear on the surface. It indicates:
A need for a report that is generated frequently
That the information provided from ARCHIBUS needs to be filtered or enhanced in some way.
That the person asking the question has a strong grasp of the abilities of Excel, but may not understand the capacity of ARCHIBUS as a reporting tool.
Monthly reports should come directly from IWMS (like
ARCHIBUS). Using IWMS for reporting
will keep all reports up to date and reduce processing time. Consider the total cost of a report:
How long does it take your team to produce this
report?
X #of hours
How often does your team produce this report?
Y
frequency
How much is your team paid per hour?
Z cost/hour
X*Y*Z = cost of the report
Don't let your team spend too much time and energy creating reports manually in excel. An IWMS application, like ARCHIBUS, will generate the reports in a fraction of the time. You will see the ROI in the long run by creating an ARCHIBUS report up-front.
Most reporting needs to be fulfilled by ARCHIBUS's standard reports that take very little time to launch. But even if you or your team want a specific excel report automated in ARCHIBUS, we can easily create it for you. If we can create the report for less than the total cost of developing the report by hand, over time we will save you money.
In following these simple guidelines, you can have greater success in your reporting. By planning out your idealized report, you can ensure you and your team are tracking the right information for your company and communicating correct statistics to help reduce overall cost
.
Like what you read? Subscribe to the blog and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest to keep up to date with the latest news from Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC.
Thoughts? Questions? Comment below and let us know what you think! We'd love to hear your insights.
Founded in February of 2000 by Robert Stephen, Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC (RSC) is a private Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) and Integrated Workforce Management Systems (IWMS) consulting firm.
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