What Reports are Required of an IWMS System?

The reports in an IWMS system are mostly used to make strategic decisions. Utilization of space is one of the more common reasons to invest in an IWMS.

When I was helping a  tech company sell their real estate to another company they told me that the numbers the IWMS system was producing did not line up with the numbers that the real estate company was producing. They told me that I had a couple of hours to figure out why. I found out the real estate company had excluded the vertical penetration of the building. I stayed late and walked all eight buildings with the real estate representative and proved all of my numbers. This resulted in a $30 million increase of the sale of the buildings. This made my job worth the work.

So who are the people that are going to read these reports and learn from them? There are four basic audiences that I break it down into.

1) V and C level

These are CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and all other chief executives and vice presidents. This group is looking for summarized data sheets packed full of numbers that will help them make strategic decisions. They are looking for anomalies so they can dig down and ask questions and figure out why the anomaly exists.

2) Managers/Directors

These people help to drive and accomplish the decisions made by the chief executives and vice presidents. The reports that are tailored for this level are similar to the V and C level, but are more detailed. This allows them to get to the depths of an anomaly and make decisions.

3) Individual Contributor

This level manages the raw data that provides the analysis for the company. They need very granulated reports that allow them to input and modify data for the two previous levels.

4) Staff at Large

The data for this level has basic information like locations of conference rooms, how to submit a work request, how to change the temperature, where are the hotel spaces in every building, etc. These reports allow all staff to search the IWMS system and then schedule or request what they need. 

IWMS reporting at all four of these levels makes for a very strong system. The reports used and produced by the IWMS system justify the expense of the system. While they are not the most expensive systems that exist, they are not the least expensive, either. Sometimes these systems are reduced or removed in order to save money for the company. Without the reports produced directly form the IWMS system, it can take longer to see that there actually are results coming from using the IWMS.

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What Reports are Required of an IWMS System?

The reports in an IWMS system are mostly used to make strategic decisions. Utilization of space is one of the more common reasons to invest in an IWMS.

When I was helping a  tech company sell their real estate to another company they told me that the numbers the IWMS system was producing did not line up with the numbers that the real estate company was producing. They told me that I had a couple of hours to figure out why. I found out the real estate company had excluded the vertical penetration of the building. I stayed late and walked all eight buildings with the real estate representative and proved all of my numbers. This resulted in a $30 million increase of the sale of the buildings. This made my job worth the work.

So who are the people that are going to read these reports and learn from them? There are four basic audiences that I break it down into.

1) V and C level

These are CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and all other chief executives and vice presidents. This group is looking for summarized data sheets packed full of numbers that will help them make strategic decisions. They are looking for anomalies so they can dig down and ask questions and figure out why the anomaly exists.

2) Managers/Directors

These people help to drive and accomplish the decisions made by the chief executives and vice presidents. The reports that are tailored for this level are similar to the V and C level, but are more detailed. This allows them to get to the depths of an anomaly and make decisions.

3) Individual Contributor

This level manages the raw data that provides the analysis for the company. They need very granulated reports that allow them to input and modify data for the two previous levels.

4) Staff at Large

The data for this level has basic information like locations of conference rooms, how to submit a work request, how to change the temperature, where are the hotel spaces in every building, etc. These reports allow all staff to search the IWMS system and then schedule or request what they need. 

IWMS reporting at all four of these levels makes for a very strong system. The reports used and produced by the IWMS system justify the expense of the system. While they are not the most expensive systems that exist, they are not the least expensive, either. Sometimes these systems are reduced or removed in order to save money for the company. Without the reports produced directly form the IWMS system, it can take longer to see that there actually are results coming from using the IWMS.

  Like what you read?  Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin! Subscribe to our mailing list to keep up to date with the latest news from RSC, LLC.

Thoughts? Questions?  Comment below and let us know what you think!  We'd love to hear your insights.

Follow @rsc2lc Tweet

Friday Training Follow Up: Reports - RSC 12 Reports

Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC provides free 30-minute Client Training session every Friday at 10:00 AM PST.  RSC prides itself in providing learning opportunities for our clients.  We feel that if our clients know the system better, we will able to work better with them to discover and implement the solutions that they need.

Last week's topic was Reports: RSC 12 Reports.  Bob Stephen, our CEO, highlighted seven reports – the other five are in the works.  RSC has created a number of reports to help our clients manage their space and personnel at a high level.  These reports contain useful information that can be presented to Chiefs and VPs to quickly get a sense of where the current workforce is located, how much their portfolio costs, and how often moves are taking place.  These reports are available to all our clients using Web Central.

THE RSC DOMAIN

RSC has created its own domain in Web Central.

Clients can create their own domains as well.

There are two processes, the RSC Reports and RSC SQL Automation Engine

THE RSC STANDARD REPORTS

Geography drill down for several views allows the user to use one type of report at a variety of locations.

Space Occupancy

This chart shows a variety of ways of looking at occupancy.

It draws a distinction between Occupied Seats and Seated Headcount.

Division Report

This is a summary report showing the headcount of divisions at various locations.

Additional detail is available to justify the totals.

Building Summary

8 summary views of building area allocations by category, type, occupancy and others.

Site Summary

Similar to the building summary applied to sites.

Churn

Number of moves completed by month, comparing employee moves and new hire moves.

Employee Scatter Chart

Thematic geography map view showing location of buildings with icons indicating the number of workers at each place.

Global Workforce Report

A dashboard showing several datapoints:

• Number of buildings
• Rentable area
• Seated headcount
• Total Cost of Ownership

Combined with drill downs that help further dissect the information

If you'd like to know more about this particular training, email us at training@rsc2lc.com

We’d love to have you join us for this week's training on AutoCAD, specifically BOMA Polylining, this Friday, Dec. 18. 

Please register by clicking on this link and follow the instructions:

https://attendee.gototraining.com/r/3796052170109670145

Registering is required to receive a confirmation email and a link to the training.

Our weekly client trainings are held Fridays from 10:00 AM to 10:30 AM PST.  This is an opportunity to learn more about an area of ARCHIBUS that you may not be familiar with.  

We look forward to seeing you there!

Like what you read?  Subscribe to the blog and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Pinterest to keep up to date with the latest news from Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC.

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Friday Training Follow Up: Types of Reports in ARCHIBUS

Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC provides free 30-minute Client Training session every Friday at 10:00AM PST!  RSC prides itself in providing learning opportunities for our clients.  We feel that if our clients know the system better, we will able to work better with them to discover and implement the solutions that they need.

Last week Bob Stephen, our CEO & Managing Director discussed Reporting in ARCHIBUS.

Specifically, we covered the Four Types of Reports in ARCHIUBS.  These reports include

1. C & VP Level Reports
2. Director and Manager Reports
3. Individual Contributor Reports
4. Reports for Staff at Large

If you'd like to know more about this particular training, email us at training@rsc2lc.com

We’d love to have you join us for this week's training on Plain AutoCAD Basics this Friday 11/20.  Please register for the training here:
https://attendee.gototraining.com/r/6239139519237186817

Registering is required to receive a confirmation email and a link to the training.

Our weekly client trainings are held Fridays from 10:00 to 10:30am.  This is an opportunity to learn more about an area of ARCHIBUS that you may not be familiar with.  

We look forward to seeing you there!

Like what you read?  Subscribe to the blog and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin 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.

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How to Better your Reporting

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:

1. A need for a report that is generated frequently
2. That the information provided from ARCHIBUS needs to be filtered or enhanced in some way.
3. 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

.

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Thoughts? Questions?  Comment below and let us know what you think!  We'd love to hear your insights.

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3 Simple Steps to Improving your Reporting Accuracy

Let me guess, there has been a time or two where Reporting has made you feel a lot like this:

News flash: you are not alone!  If you've struggled with accuracy in reporting there is a light at the end of the tunnel -- and Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC will help you find it!  It's no surprise that many struggle with reporting accuracy.  There are many little pieces of the puzzle that all need to be correct in order to produce an accurate report.

So, we've identified the problem, but how do we fix it?

The solution is actually quite simple. In order to get at least 98% accuracy, it is essential you follow these three steps:

1. Have a regularly scheduled employee synchronization with the HR department.
• A regularly scheduled employee synchronization with the HR department protects your data.  It assures that all employees are up to date in the system and that employee location and assets are current and tracked accurately.
2. Have a single move process that is followed.
• Make no exceptions.  Period.  It doesn't matter how large or small the move is, if you ensure that one particular move process is followed every single time a move is made, your data is significantly more likely to come out accurate.
3. Walk the floors on a regular basis.
• That means committing to update your data by walking floors once a quarter or once a year.  Whichever you decide, please: keep it consistent!  The more consistent you are, the more accurate your data will be and thus the more accurate your reports will be.

Did you find this article helpful?  Let us know what you think!  Comment below with feedback or other ways you've found help improve reporting accuracy.

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ARCHIBUS Client Server & Excel Pivot Table Reporting

BAATUG is a wonderful training event.  It is more than just information on ARCHIBUS.  Often times Head of Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC, Bob Stephen, demonstrates tips, techniques, and best practices that make your workflow significantly easier. 

A while back, Bob Stephen shared some tricks at an amazing BAATUG event hosted by Stanford.  This little technique Bob taught was so good we created a tutorial to share with all you who missed the event.

This tutorial is broken into two parts:

(1) Writing reports in Microsoft Excel

(2) How to export ARCHIBUS data to Microsoft Excel and update it regularly

Sometimes you need a report that just isn’t in ARCHIBUS, or that you don’t WANT to be in ARCHIBUS, because you’d rather use the flexibility and power of Excel to combine the data from ARCHIBUS with other sources, or to slice and dice it using Excel Pivot Tables.  All of these things are possible using the technique described below.

The reason this works is because ARCHIBUS Client Server uses ODBC connections to reach the database, and so can Excel.  From this point forward, we will assume you know the afm password to the database.

Below are the steps:

• Open a new, blank workbook in Microsoft Excel
• On the "Data" tab, choose "From Other Sources" then "From Microsoft Query" from the drop down:

• A box will appear that lets you choose which database you want to pull data from
• These are all ODBC data sources.  If you don’t see the one you want,  go into Client Server and set up a Project to connect to that database.  Once you've set up the Project connection it will become available.  (ARCHIBUS Client Server creates ODBC Data Sources to make its own connection to the database; we are piggybacking off that)
• Choose your data source and click “OK”.  
• For now, we’ll leave the “Query Wizard” box checked.

• A database login dialog box will appear.  The Login ID will likely default to "afm."  In order to move forward you will need to know the password for the database.  Enter the password and hit "OK."

• The Query Wizard will now appear.  You should be able to choose which database table you would like to use for the data.  In this example we will use the em and rm tables.

• Pick the columns you want and hit the "Next" button.
• NOTE:  If you pick data from different but related tables, the Query Wizard does the join for you.
• From there you will be taken through some other forms;  it is safe to click the defaults to get the data into Excel.
• You should see something that looks like a grid -- a rich set of data about rooms and the people that occupy them:

• With just a little more effort a more more detailed analysis can be done with Count of seated employees by Division Department sliced by Region/Site

• If and when the data in ARCHIBUS changes, you just need to Refresh it:
• Return to the "Data" tab
• Right click on the data, and click "Refresh"
• Your data is now up to date
• If you are using Pivot Tables, you will need to refresh these as well after making the changes
• Want to Edit your Query?
• Click on the data table
• Select the "Data" tab, then "Properties" from the drop down menu

• Push the button to the right of "Name" to get "Connection Properties" dialog box
• Click the "Definitions" Tab, then "Edit Query" tab

• And you'll be right back to editing the Query
• A Quick Note of Caution:
• Queries are not portable.  They want to be run from the machine on which they were created.  If you email the spreadsheet to a friend, they will be able to see and change the pivot table, but will not be able to refresh the data or access the query.

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